Sunday, November 28, 2010

The Final Stretch

This holiday weekend (after taking Thanksgiving off) has been a marathon of project work. I have almost finished my Electronic Publishing project; a few tune-ups of the web page and a final edit of the paper and I'm finished. Then I'll use this blog to regale you with amusing anecdotes about online dating and other AOA nonsense. I have quite a backlog of dating stories; obviously my dating life has been less than successful. 
But before I begin my cranky chronicle, I have to physically construct a book of poetry for my poetry workshop class. I have already created an Adobe InDesign document for the text. It was a little iffy at the beginning as to whether or not I would remember how to use InDesign, but after a bit of playing around, it came back to me. I purchased a beautiful sheet of handmade blue-veined paper to use for the cover. My title is, Through Larkspur Veins, and the paper evokes a blue-veined madness. I have a little problem with one of the poems, an experimental piece called "To DH (dead husband)." I know, it sounds morbid, but really, it's not. It's a minimalist spreadsheet of related words. Really, not morbid or sentimental. 
Anyway, the problem is that it's a full 8 x 10 page set in landscape (a 90 degree rotation), and I want my beautiful book to be 4.5 " wide by 8" long. And I'm not THAT good at InDesign. I think I'm going to resort to old fashioned handiwork and make that poem the center 2 pages, so they open into one poem. You'll have to rotate the book to see it, but it should work. This means I'll have to number pages by hand, since I don't know a way to accomplish this rotational trick in InDesign. 
Anyway, I'm very excited about this book. This is the first poetry class I've ever taken and it's been amazing. Not only can I occasionally turn out a good poem, everything I've learned this semester translates into better short fiction, which is my true love (and the only true love for the moment).
Keep an eye on this site: I'll post the link to the Communal Writing Experiment result shortly. It's at the top of my list.

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