A Far Out Fantastic Site

Pasting my draft of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” to the manuscript template for the print edition is taking a little longer than I thought it would. I didn’t realise how tedious it would be to cut and paste from my manuscript to the template. I have to do it paragraph by paragraph rather than in larger sections. W hen I did it the latt er way with The Fool’sIllusion   it screwed up the entire format and so I had to keep readjusting the settings which doing so delay ed the book’s releas e. I think the template is formatted based on paragraph breaks more than on larger units of text. Cutting and pasting my manuscript one paragraph at a time was so redundantly frustrating that I had to stop after about an hour and get out of the house for a while. So I hopped into my Chevy Malibu (a.k.a. a “Classic”) and drove down to one of the nearby fast food joints for a diet cola and to work in some revisions of the short story I’m currently working on. I had to get away from the redun...

Credit: Pixabay.com I continued working on my book cover illustration for “Circa Sixty Years Dead” all last week. I’ve been colouring it with coloured pencil and so was about to fill in the background sky. Then it occurred to me that I would probably have to replace that part with digital paint when it’s time to upload it to Amazon. I want the sky to have the realistic effect of a smooth, blue-black colour. Not only would that take too long to colour in with pencil but it would also require too much lead; I’m drawing this on 18-inch-by-24-inch paper. So, that will be the only digitally produced part of the illustration when the book is published. I try to stick to the original artistic experience as much as possible when publishing my art and books. In this case, that experience comes from paper, ink and coloured pencil. As hand-produced art stays closer to the artist’s creational act than does digitally produced art, print copies of books stay closer to the original copy than d...