Date June 27, 2020
Summery (starting with a pun, not a misspelling)
June has busted out all over and we’re into the hot n stick summertime. This week, I explore da gays and pride. There’s a link to a wonderful resource – cyark. Again I pull a pic from the flickr LOC – plus a few quotes from the fellow. Those interested in nuts, bolts and grind of publishing get a bit of an inside look at the joy of layout. A great announcement about a new author and new book provides balance to the sad news of a delay because of the printer for Who Plugged the Dyke. New release date – August 20. Finally, a plug for a fellow author’s book. It grabbed me, so I bought a copy.
Stay happy. Stay safe. I have noticed that many people who are resistant to wearing a mask on their face would be doing us all a favor if they put a bag on. People have been suggesting it to me for years and I’m finally listening.
1. How ‘bout Them Homos?
Early in the morning of June 28, police raided a gay bar in New York. They did this on a regular basis – it was fun to destroy the lives of queers, because back then, there were no protections and being found out meant being at least fired. It was illegal to be a homo. It was illegal to be dressed in clothes that were not “correct” for one’s gender. It was a Saturday morning, so the party started on Friday night, the attack by the boys in blue came on Saturday morning … and this time, the poofs fought back. Riots went on for 6 days. On July 2, the Village Voice was the site of a protest because of an article that referred to the “forces of faggotry”. The police defended the paper. The violence and destruction were not the beginning of the gay rights movement, but they sure made people who wanted to ignore what happened to “those people” pay attention. Hmmm… is there a lesson there for the necessity and effectiveness of public expressions of rage? Then, it only took 50 more years for the Supreme Court to rule that employers couldn’t exempt homos from human decency. https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/theme/activism-before-stonewall/
2. Three Dimensional Explorations
For the great resource this week, let’s take a 3D trip to CyArk https://www.cyark.org/ . LINKS TO CYARK, STONEWALL, MESA VERDE. I spent quite a bit of time on their Mesa Verde site as well as Taos Pueblo when I was writing Adima Rising. It put me in the place and space of the book. It is amazing to me that I grew up thinking of Native Americans as primitive people. Taos has been inhabited for over 1000 years.
https://www.cyark.org/projects/taos-pueblo/overview
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3. Picture and Quote Here’s this week’s picture. It is Elbert Hubbard, who was a
champeeen soap salesman and went on to found the Roycroft artisan
community https://www.roycroftcampuscorporation.com/ . This picture from the Library of Congress collection is particularly interesting "Never explain - your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway." ~ Elbert Hubbard "The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you'll make one." ~ Elbert Hubbard "Positive anything is better than negative nothing." ~ Elbert Hubbard |
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This week’s word – patience.
If you’ve ever painted a room, you might have noticed that saying, “I’m going to paint the kitchen.” is much easier than actually painting the damn thing. It takes less than a second to form the thought and speak the declaration. However, as you move all the counters and tables and appliances and bend and squeeze to first wash and then mask and then paint and then trim and then fix all the places where drips dripped, the realization hits that painting the kitchen is actually a time consuming exercise.
Much the same thing happens with writing and publishing. I’ll get into editing in next week’s newsletter. This week, let’s visit the process of printing.
Assume a book all ready to go – every word is perfect. Every picture is a thing of beauty. It is ready to burst forth and enlighten a dark world.
Now the fun has just begun.
First comes the layout. You need to use a layout program for this. Adobe has InDesign (https://www.adobe.com/products/indesign.html ). Corel has CorelDraw(https://www.coreldraw.com/en/product/coreldraw/#prod-hero ) . The open source alternative is Scribus (https://www.scribus.net/ ). These programs mimic the old paste up. I once had a job many moons ago doing paste up for a magazine. They would type in the articles and print them on an extra fancy, way clear printer – not the common dot matrix of the day. My job would then be to take the pieces of paper and cut them into the proper size to fit around pictures and correct column lengths. Then coat them with wax and place them correctly on a large paste up board. To move a piece, one had to very carefully pry up the wax coated paper and reposition it. Then the whole thing would be photographed and sent to the printer.
It’s not so messy now, but it is still very time consuming. Layout the template. Put in the guidelines. Now every page isn’t the same. The side where all the pages are bound together is called the gutter (as in keep your mind out of… ). You need a little extra space on that side because you can’t read where the pages join. However on the other three sides, the printer will trim about 1/8” off. On all sides, there is about ½” of “unsafe” space, where a trim may go awry, so you can’t put anything important. However …. if you are laying out a picture book (like The Pompadorians ) and you want the picture to go to the edge of the page, you need to extend the picture to beyond the edge (so the printer can trim) but make sure that nothing important is in the 1/8” trim or the 1/2” “unsafe” zone. Of course, to edit the picture, you need an image editor. The most common are Adobe Photoshop (https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html?promoid=PC1PQQ5T&mv=other ) , Corel PhotoPaint (included with CorelDraw suite) or the open source GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/ ) .
AND remember that the margins will be 1/8” different on the even and odd pages because the gutter is on the left on odd pages and on the right on even pages.
Easy – right?
And when one is not particularly good with remembering or visualizing, such as moi, it is a near certainty that mistakes will be made. Often these mistakes are not discovered until many many pages have been completed. Patience.
It’s been a busy week at Any Summer Sunday Books. Happy Birthday to us. This week we celebrated one year of existence. Last June 21, Any Summer Sunday at Nacho Mama’s Patio Cafe was released. You might notice that I’m using we, not me and I. No, it’s not the royal we. This week, we have added a new author to our lineup. Mark Philpott, a San Francisco illustrator has been working on a children’s picture book for many years. It’s the story of a family, the Pompadorians (and let’s guess what their hairstyle is), who go on a family vacation to San Francisco. Whimsical and fun, the illustrations capture the magical delight of San Francisco. There are some issues with the printer, but we are hoping that it will be released on July 17. That is also the release date for Who Plugged the Dyke. (not really, see bad news below) That means – It’s TWINS !!!! Have a cigar. How did that become a thing – handing out a cigar at the birth of a child? I’ve always thought that cigar smokers looked like they were performing, or wanting to perform, an act better practiced in private. So, is the handing out of cigars a reference to the father’s part in procreation? Just wondering.
Late Breaking Broken
In the world of publishing, most books you find in your local bookstores are distributed by Ingram. Way back in olden times, when you published a book, you had to do a press run. It was usually too expensive to print less than several hundred books. An author who self published had to figure out how to store and sell 500 or so books. In today’s modern world of the future, books are printed a very few at a time, sometimes only one at a time. There are machines that print, fold, collate, print the cover and stick the whole thing together and bind it. Amazing! This is called print on demand, or POD. That means it is much easier to get into the publishing business. However, you still want to have the thing distributed and most bookstores only use Ingram because the last thing they want to track is a bunch of different distributors. A publisher can print a bunch of books and ship them to Ingram for distribution, but that means paying for a bunch of books to be printed, plus the cost of storage at Ingram. In reality, it makes sense to have Ingram print and distribute. Groovy – right? Well… there’s a problem. With COVID and lots more orders, Ingram has fallen way behind on their printing (and their support). What that means is that I still haven’t gotten the advance copies I ordered a couple of weeks ago to find any (there are always some) mistakes. In addition, Ingram is reporting a 22 day delay in printing. That means that I can release Who Plugged the Dyke on July 17, but I can’t actually have any books by then. Sigh. That means I am delaying the release. The new release date is August 20, 2020. That will still give enough time to peruse before the election. Of course, that also means that it will be overshadowing the Republican convention, which starts four days later. I figure the pres will denounce it from the podium. One can dream.
This week’s coolio book
I read the description of
this book and decided I wanted to ask for a review copy. Then I went to
the Amazon page and read the author’s bio. I ordered the book. Check it
out. Read his bio. I’ll be posting a review, but I’m tingling with
antici … pation.
A deal has been struck. The twenty-first century has a visitor. He visits earth for one year each century. On arrival, he is stripped of his power. The devil is one of us, among us. Living down under. Lucifer is on leave. And he's here, in Australia.