San Diego, CA
Grab a passport to access a world of independent bookstores at annual San Diego Book Crawl
Her mom was diligent about keeping a very young Kaley McCabe supplied with computer paper. The budding artist would spend hours during her childhood making up stories and fashioning them into books she stapled together and created construction paper book covers for them.
“My parents always encouraged my drawings: My mom is an elementary school teacher, and she has a massive collection of children’s books. I think she always knew I would end up being an illustrator, and she and my dad were both supportive of my love of art. They still have a lot of my terrible drawings from when I was a kid,” she says.
It’s unlikely that anyone would describe her work as “terrible” today— a senior designer for children’s books at ReaderLink and a freelance illustrator, McCabe has also illustrated the “Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: You’re My Little Nightmare” and “Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Welcome to Halloween Town!” children’s books, and she’s one of the featured artists in this year’s San Diego Book Crawl, alongside illustrator Susie Ghahremani. The annual event celebrates Independent Bookstore Day (the last Saturday in April), and this year’s book crawl is April 26 to 28, with people encouraged to visit as many of the 14 participating locations as possible for a chance to earn prizes by making purchases (in person) and getting the event passport stamped at each location. As book crawl artists, McCabe created the main artwork featured in the marketing and merchandise, and Ghahremani designed and created the limited-edition collectible pins.
McCabe, 31, lives in Rancho Peñasquitos with her husband, Jake, and talked a bit about her process for creating some of her work, where she likes to go book hunting, and her favorite heavy metal bands.
Q: What do you think it was about visual art that you were initially drawn to (pun intended)?
A: I loved being able to create worlds and the characters that inhabited them. And even when I was drawing things from cartoons or other media, I would also make my own characters to be a part of the stories I loved so much.
Q: In what ways has your love of the art form evolved over the years?
A: As a kid I always loved children’s books and graphic novels, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve really come to appreciate how much work goes into each book. I oftentimes revisit children’s books I read a million times over as a child and will catch details or jokes I never noticed before. There’s so much heart that is put into books that I now understand after being part of the creation process.
What I love about Rancho Peñasquitos…
My neighborhood is very quiet, but it’s also close to the 15 highway, so it’s very easy to get anywhere in San Diego. I love that there is a park right down the street from me, which I often go to just to swing. My husband and I take a long walk every day around our neighborhood, and we have a lot of kind people we chit-chat with on our route. There’s also a lot of animals we see in people’s windows and yards that we’ve given our own names to. I especially love when we get to see Tuxedo, a small black-and-white cat who is often roaming the cul-de-sac. She’s a sweetheart!
Q: In your bio on the San Diego Book Crawl website, it mentions your work illustrating the “Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: You’re My Little Nightmare” book. You also illustrated “Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Welcome to Halloween Town!” The first is a board book and the latter features flaps, pull tabs, and other interactive elements based on the popular film. What was your relationship to the movie before working on these books?
A: I’m sure it comes as no shock, but I was obsessed with “The Nightmare Before Christmas” as a kid. I remember taking my friends to the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood to see a 3D showing of the movie for my birthday one year. I replayed the DVD over and over again in my room while I drew in sketchbooks or played computer games. Tim Burton and his uniquely creepy point of view was a massive inspiration to me, and “Nightmare” was my favorite work of his. I wish I could go back to my younger self and tell her she would one day be working with Tim Burton and his team on books—she’d flip!
Q: Can you talk a bit about your creative process for illustrating books based on such well-known and beloved drawings?
A: My process for working on licensed books is a bit different than typical projects. Since these are established characters, often they come with specific rules: what you can show a character doing, what environments they can be in, etc. Keeping those guidelines in mind, I’ll start working on very loose sketches to lay out each page. I’ll do these very quick (often scribble) drawings for each page of the book, to get an idea of how the layouts will work together as a full book. Once I’m happy with the general direction, I’ll go in and do rough sketches of the characters and backgrounds to block everything out. The characters don’t need to be incredibly accurate at this point; I just need to get across what I’m thinking to the editors and the licensing team to get their feedback. After this, I go in and start working on tight sketches, which is where you home in on the details and make sure everything is on-model. This can take a long time, depending on how complex characters and backgrounds are. In the case of “Nightmare,” I often find myself scrubbing through the movie frame-by-frame to find specific references and small details.
Once the tight sketches are done, they are sent to the licensing team again to get their feedback. This is usually when the most changes are made. Often, licensing teams will supply you with bluelines or redlines, which are corrective overlays to your artwork that show you exactly how they’d like you to revise a pose. They’re usually images that just have your original sketch at half-opacity and then a red or blue drawing on top to show the corrections (hence the name).
Once that stage is over, you can start to work on colors. This is usually the longest stage, but to me this is the most fun part. Getting to bring the sketches to final render is satisfying, plus at this point I can usually sit back and just enjoy the process; the details and layout have all been figured out already, so I have a set blueprint to just add color to.
Q: What inspires you in your artwork, in the creative process?
A: This is a little meta, but seeing other creative people inspires me to be creative. I always get really inspired when I watch a great animated movie, play a great video game, or when I’m browsing through thrift stores and come across old, illustrated books or toys and dishware. Video games, especially, have been a creative inspiration for me-I recently played through the “Psychonaut” video games after finishing a large book project, and it really helped rejuvenate me.
Q: Do you have any local bookstores you frequent? Favorite local spots to go to when you want to read or draw?
A: My favorite place to browse books is actually my local library! The (Rancho Peñasquitos) library is very lovely and quiet. Especially right now, when federal funding is getting cut for libraries and book banning is on the rise, I want to give my library as much support as I can.
As for where I like to draw, I wish I had a cool, artsy answer for this, but I honestly love drawing most when I’m alone on my bed. In my head, I love the idea of going to a local coffee shop to draw, but I get anxious about drawing in public. I have a daydream of taking my iPad to the San Diego Zoo and drawing some of the animals, but I need to psyche myself up to do it. Maybe I’ll make that one of my goals for 2025!
Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
A: The best advice I’ve ever received is to just draw every single day. Even if I am completely burned out and have no desire to draw, I will at least scribble something out for 5 minutes. Doing this every day helps you maintain all the training you’ve put into your drawing hand and stops it from “getting rusty.”
Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?
A: If you just saw my artwork, you’d probably never guess that my favorite genre of music is heavy metal! I’ve loved metal for a long time, but the sub-genres I listen to frequently have changed over time. I started with loving symphonic metal (Nightwish, Delain, Within Temptation), but in recent years I’ve also gotten into metalcore, which is a mix of metal and hardcore music (aka, lots of harsh, angry vocals). My favorite bands are Spiritbox, The Devil Wears Prada, Motionless in White, Lacuna Coil, Architects, and The Birthday Massacre. There’s something cathartic about drawing cute unicorns while listening to loud angry music, haha.
Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.
A: My husband Jake and I have annual passes to the (San Diego) Zoo, so my ideal weekend in San Diego is to visit the zoo early in the morning—ideally when the red panda is out and about, he’s so cute! Then, I’d go visit a local goth clothing and accessory store called La Loupe Noir and probably spend way too much money. Then, we could stop and get some coffee at a local shop (Seven Seas Roasting Co. is right next door), before heading over to La Jolla to see the sea lions on the ocean cliffs. Then we could round out the day by going to Tokyo Central and Main to grab some snacks and their premade meals (the katsu chicken is delicious).
Originally Published:
San Diego, CA
San Diego’s cost-of-living committee led big policy fights in 2025. The City Council is ending it.
A year after creating a special committee on cost-of-living, the San Diego City Council is shutting it down.
Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who chaired the committee, said he was content to let it die as the council had plenty of work to do completing policy initiatives that started there.
The committee took on some of the most high profile and divisive issues that the city considered last year, such as the successful effort to increase the minimum wage for tourism workers to $25 starting in July 2026.
But it also operated just as city officials passed new and increased fees that added to residents’ cost of living. The city’s new monthly trash fee, hikes to parking rates around town and increased charges for using city facilities all hit residents’ bottom lines this year.
Elo-Rivera stood by approving those fees with one hand while trying to combat costs with the other.
“The cuts on the table that those fee increases mitigated or avoided — library, recreation center and park hours services — were things the community said they didn’t want cut,” he said. “The fees we established were the most fiscally responsible way to avoid those cuts.”
Elo-Rivera is still pushing two other cost-of-living initiatives that could pass in 2026. One is a joint effort with the county to ban landlords from charging hidden fees tacked on to rent. The other is a potential June ballot measure to impose a $5,000 per-bedroom tax on vacation rentals or second homes.
“I completely understand why someone would say, ‘If you want to fix the cost of living, don’t raise these other costs,’” Elo-Rivera said. “We proposed a vacation home tax for the specific purpose of having the things that city residents want and deserve, without the cost of that resource falling on the backs of middle class and working class San Diegans.”
San Diego this year also became the first city in the country to ban grocery stores from offering digital-only deals, another initiative that started at the committee.
Elo-Rivera said the fees the city passed this year “only made it more important to have urgency to address cost-of-living increases driven by corporate greed, those that are disproportionately felt by everyday people.”
Councilmembers Henry Foster III and Marni von Wilpert also served on the select committee. Elo-Rivera credited them for stepping up.
“Everyone wants to talk about affordability, but nobody wants to own it,” he said. “There’s a tension there, but those two weren’t afraid to stand next to this issue and wrestle it.”
SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — A local mother is raising awareness about holiday theft after her children’s Christmas presents were stolen from their family home.
Meanwhile, San Diego police are warning people to be wary of scammers and thieves this time of year when the department sees a rise in these types of crimes.
“All the gifts that were hidden from my children were all gone,” said Kristin Lyons.
Plans for a Christmas surprise are now a loss for her two boys. Just before 3 a.m. Friday, a holiday grinch was caught on camera walking up the family’s University Heights driveway.
“It was a male. Jeans, gray sweatshirt, black backpack, a brown Padres hat and he came in on a bike,” said Lyons.
The alleged thief used a flashlight to search their carport before leaving with arms full.
“It was a big bin full of like 30 or 40 gifts wrapped,” according to Lyons. She explained the gifts included a scooter, shoes, clothes, and toys for her 3 and 4-year-old sons.
“They may not be very expensive items, they were very sentimental and personalized for the kids,” said Lyons.
Her neighborhood is located off Park Blvd. and Adams Ave. “We’ve had a lot of foot traffic, which has increased a lot of the crime as well.”
She said she and her neighbors rely on security cameras for safety, but hope police increase patrols after filing a report.
“There’s crimes of opportunity,” said SDPS Lt. Cesar Jimenez. He added that typically thieves look for easy targets.
“They’re looking for homes that are empty. They’re also looking into windows, and if people have all their presents, they have their Christmas tree by a window with all the presents underneath, then that’s a big temptation,” said Lt. Jimenez.
He advised residents to avoid placing their Christmas tree right by a window and to make sure packages are secured and out of sight.
Meanwhile, Lyons said she wants others to learn from her experience and isn’t letting this bring her and her family down.
She added that a neighbor found a partially wrapped gift dumped in the area and returned it to her after they saw her Nextdoor post. She’d like others who may stumble upon more gifts to also post about it on the Nextdoor app in the University Heights area, and she will keep an eye out.
The Husker football program announced its second hire to the coaching staff on the morning of Dec. 19.
Though it was first reported on Dec. 11, the university took to social media Friday morning to make it official that former San Diego State edges coach Roy Manning would be following defensive coordinator Rob Aurich to Lincoln. Per his coaching bio on the Huskers.com website, Manning will be in the same assistant role at Nebraska for the 2026 season.
The news marks the first defensive assistant hire for Aurich as a Husker and comes roughly a week and a half after the dismissal of Terry Bradden as defensive line coach. While Manning is not a 1:1 replacement for Bradden, he is expected to oversee a smaller position group as the Huskers look to overhaul their defensive scheme under its new leader.
With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about Nebraska football’s newest defensive hire.
Manning arrives in Lincoln with a dozen years of defensive coaching experience at the Division I level, spanning multiple power conferences included the Big Ten and Big 12. He has coached at three of the 10 winningest programs in college football history, including Michigan, USC, and now, Nebraska. Most recently, Manning worked under Aurich at San Diego State, where the two were instrumental in engineering one of the nation’s most dramatic defensive turnarounds in 2025.
At San Diego State, Manning coached the Aztecs’ defensive edge players as SDSU produced one of the best defensive seasons in program history. The Aztecs led the nation with three shutouts and ranked fifth nationally in scoring defense, allowing just 12.6 points per game. San Diego State also finished seventh nationally in total defense and first in the country in red zone defense, something the Huskers finished 2025 second-to-last in. He helped oversee a unit that made a 17-point improvement in scoring defense from the previous season.
Prior to his time at San Diego State, Manning spent two seasons at USC as the Trojans’ assistant head coach for defense and outside linebackers coach. Before USC, Manning coached cornerbacks at Oklahoma from 2019 to 2021, helping the Sooners win two Big 12 titles and reach the College Football Playoff. His defensive backs were a major factor in Oklahoma’s ability to generate turnovers and limit explosive passing plays, with multiple All-Big 12 selections and an NFL Draft pick emerging from his position group.
Manning’s coaching career also includes stops at UCLA, Washington State, Michigan, and Cincinnati, giving him experience coaching nearly every defensive position group, along with special teams and even offensive roles early in his career. A former Michigan linebacker and NFL veteran, Manning has been part of championship programs as both a player and a coach, contributing to conference titles in the Big Ten and Big 12 and appearances in multiple conference championship games. His winning pedigree now carries over to Nebraska as he joins Rhule’s staff, tasked with returning the Huskers to a top defensive unit in the country.
Rhule emphasized that Manning’s addition to the staff is about adding a coach who understands defense holistically. “Roy has experience coaching defense from front to back,” Rhule said. The versatility was a key factor in the hire, allowing Nebraska to add a coach who can connect the front seven with the back end of the defense with more seamlessness as Aurich invokes his new scheme.
Continuity was another major theme in Rhule’s comments, as Manning joins Aurich after the two brough whole sale improvements to the Aztecs this fall. “Along with Coach Aurich, he was a key part of the defensive transformation at San Diego State this past season,” Rhule said. Nebraska’s head coach highlighted the trust built between the two coaches and the value of bringing in staff members who have already proven they can work together at a high level, particularly when installing a new system and expectations from day one.
For Manning, the move to Nebraska represents both an opportunity and a responsibility tied to the program’s history. “Nebraska Football is one of the most storied and respected programs in the entire country,” Manning said, expressing gratitude to Rhule and excitement about joining the Huskers staff. Manning added that he’s eager to begin building relationships within the program and help spark the same improvements the Aztecs did in 2025 in his new defensive room.
With Manning’s hire now official, Nebraska appears to be adding a coach with a proven track record of defensive success. In 2025 alone, the duo of Manning and Aurich helped San Diego State record 32 sacks in 12 regular-season games. For context, Nebraska finished the 2025 season with just 19 of its own.
No matter how it’s framed, Manning arrives in Lincoln with the pedigree and experience to match. With 15 of Nebraska’s 18 listed defensive linemen currently underclassmen, Manning will have the opportunity to develop a young corps with the same traits that defined his most recent defensive stops.
While Nebraska is still expected to continue its search for a true defensive line coach, Manning’s addition gives the Huskers another proven developer with lengthy Power Four experience. The reunion of former San Diego State coaches Aurich and Manning brings immediate credibility to Nebraska’s defensive rebuild. For Manning, it represents a return to Power Four football. For Nebraska, it’s a hire that appears positioned to accelerate the program’s defensive progress up front.
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