"It's an amazing thing to see an idea in your head come out through someone else's fingertips more vivid than it was in your own head," said Cal Fussman, author of "The Guest Who Threw Tomatoes," a book for children illustrated by 1995 CCS graduate Lucy Schaeffer.

The book tells the story of a "crazy Spaniard who comes to visit the Sapikowski family," said Schaeffer. "It's a whirlwind of mishaps as he tries to show them about Spanish festivals. It's messy and fun."

Fussman said the idea for the story arrived with a guest from Spain who showed up at the Fussman house for a "wonderful visit, but the house just got flipped upside down." The visitor left in time to escape a severe snowstorm that forced the Fussmans into a four-day hermitage.

"I wrote the story to keep the kids occupied and having fun," said Fussman.

Fussman has ties to Cooperstown through Brewery Ommegang, where he plays the emperor Charles at the annual Belgian Festival. He is Esquire's "Perfect Man," and wrote a series of articles for the publication about his efforts to improve himself by becoming knowledgeable about matters as diverse as fitness, wine and tantric sex.

After leaving Cooperstown, Schaeffer spent a year in Japan as a Rotary exchange student. She went to Yale University for painting and printmaking and spent a year in Italy teaching art. She is currently an art assistant at Town & Country magazine, responsible for the party, wedding and contributor pages.

"She's been an artist since day one," said her father, Bill Schaeffer.

"The Guest Who Threw Tomatoes," is a thirty-two page book, and was initially conceived by Fussman to have black and white line drawings similar to those in Beverly Cleary's Ramona stories, Schaeffer said. The process began with Schaeffer doing a series of character sketches.

"Cal had an idea of what he wanted the characters to look like," Schaeffer said. "He couldn't describe it, but he knew when he saw it."

Once the characters were established visually, Schaeffer went through the book to plot places where drawings could go naturally.

"The pictures should tell a second story," she said. "Children discover new things in the illustrations."

Parts of the book that seemed made for an illustration were actually ill-suited, Schaeffer said, because they were too highly specific.

"Some scenes are too much to illustrate," she said. "If Cal described the direction a kid is running in while something else is going on, that wouldn't be a place where I'd choose to do a drawing. But if there's a line like 'Pepe cooked in the kitchen,' I could just go crazy on that."

"Drawing is really another language," Fussman said. "It was a pretty amazing process. We could sit on the phone and talk about something, and then minutes later she would get it from her computer to mine. A lot of things happened that I'd never imagined happening. Her style is pure Lucy, like nobody else in the world."

Fussman said he was impressed by the way Schaeffer could break a three thousand word story neatly into sixteen segments.

"She's magnificent in a lot of ways," he said. "It's not just the pencil and brush in her hand. It's the concept in her head. She would have an idea and would push me to improve things. Every time you talk to her, you feel like you're moving to a better place."

The illustrations evolved from pen and ink to color when Schaeffer presented Fussman with a watercolor painting and he wanted the whole book done in the same medium.

The success of the book has already been measured by the reaction of Fussman's daughter Kayla's preschool class.

"We had a reading at her preschool," Fussman said. The students enjoyed the book, he said, and three days later when one of the students was given gifts in class, the book among them, they all started jumping up and down and cheering. Fussman said this kind of reaction wouldn't have been possible without Schaeffer.

"We have our own small publishing company," said Schaeffer, "Unidentical Twins. It's a take-off on the way Cal and I work together. We don't have a similar outlook with regard to business practices, but in the end, we're a great team."

The books will be available in January at www.unidenticaltwins.com, and will be on the shelves of local bookstores soon, Schaeffer said. Fussman said books ordered from the website can contain personalized autographs.