Ben Crowder

A quickie today, since I’ve got to run to the store (my C.S. Lewis class is watching Shadowlands tonight and it’s a potluck). It’s still the North Pole outside. ~sigh~

1. Are there people who don’t write on their hand? Just curious.

2. Apparently we humans can tell how tall and heavy someone is from the sound of their voice, and we do a pretty good job of it. (This is without seeing the person, of course.) One of the ways we sense that someone is gay or lesbian is if they sound shorter than their voice (for guys) or taller (for girls). Interesting.

3. There is a wonderful joy in pulling your socks up.

4. Want to weird someone out? Walk side-by-side with someone you don’t know and see what they do. If you’re just behind or just ahead, it’s not the same; but if you’re directly to the side, it creates a kind of intimacy.

5. You know how we have a kinesthetic sense so we can tell where our fingers are without being able to see them? I wonder if the same idea applies with our spirits somehow. (Meaning now, while housed in these mortal bodies.)

6. I’ve kept a log of which books I’ve read for several years now, and it’s a good thing. I think I’m going to create two new logs: one for entertainment (movies, plays, concerts, etc.) and one for creative works (the various things I work on, including when I start them and when I finish them). All of this information is already in my journals, but it’ll be nice to have it in log form so I can easily see where my most productive months were, and if there’s a correlation between entertainment and creative works, and whatnot. And it’ll help someday when I start writing my autobiography. ;)

I’m thinking about making Riverglen Press a PDF-only gig. Lulu’s good, to be sure, but I like having more control over the output — with Lulu my choices are quite limited, and it’s hard to get the desired result. (Mainly with the covers; the body has generally been okay. I want matte covers, not glossy! :))

Let me take a step back and say that for most people, Lulu will do the job just fine. It’s just that for designers who want to fine-tune the process, they can’t.

Advantages of being PDF-only:

• Total control. I don’t have to worry about the printer or anything else; if it opens in Acrobat Reader (and Preview on the Mac), then it’ll be fine. I need peace of mind. :)
• Faster. I don’t have to wait a week for books to come back from Lulu, so I’ll be able to publish more.
• Lulu’s web design. It’s ugly. No longer will part of my operation be based on their site, which gives me full control over the “customer” experience. (I add the quotes because Riverglen Press’s PDF eBooks will always be free.)
• 21st century. Not that I think books are going to disappear — I sure hope they don’t! — but there is something cool about the idea of a PDF-only publisher. And someday when I have more control over the printed output, I’ll start making real books again.

I haven’t completely decided to abandon Lulu — and I’ll keep both Project Cumorah and A Christmas Carol up, of course — but it’s looking like I’ll move in that direction.

[tags]Riverglen Press, Lulu, PDF[/tags]

My proof copy of A Christmas Carol arrived today, accompanied by a few problems:

Problem #1: Lulu doesn’t like InDesign’s transparency, as you can see from the back cover (it should be roughly the same red as the front cover). The solution: I opened the back cover image in Photoshop and overlaid it on the same background color as I’d had in InDesign, flattened the whole thing, and reimported it. It should turn out fine.

Problem #2: The red box on the spine is my fault; I hadn’t realized that the text box had a fill. The solution: Changed the fill to transparent.

Problem #3: There’s some slight banding on the front cover. The solution: Opened the cover image in Photoshop and added some subtle noise and dust & speckles.

Problem #4: Spine text too small, and “display” causes the serifs to start disappearing. The solution: Bumped the text size up by six or eight points, and changed the type from “display” to “regular.”

I’ve just ordered a new proof copy, so in about a week I’ll hopefully have this book finished and available.

Phew. :)

[tags]A Christmas Carol, Lulu, InDesign, Photoshop, bookmaking[/tags]

Winter arrived yesterday with a couple of snowstorms. And it’s making a statement today — right now it’s five degrees Fahrenheit outside (-15ºC), and with wind chill it feels like -8ºF (-22ºC). Walking to school was quite the adventure.

While I don’t mind the cold quite so much, what I do mind is ice on the sidewalks and roads. Yesterday on my way home I had to waddle like a penguin to keep from slipping (my shoes have no traction; I’ll probably have to stab them with a knife to create some, since ice skating is not my ideal form of transportation). I don’t like being constantly unsure of my footing. It’s wretched. And yet being miserable isn’t exactly fun, so perhaps I’ll somehow try to like it. I’ve always wanted to spend three weeks in the hospital… Whatever. ~sigh~

At any rate, if I were homeless in this kind of weather, I would pray for death. Or break into some building — jail would be warmer than the frigid outside. Suddenly some types of crime become more understandable… (Not necessarily justified, of course, but the motives become clearer.)

Connor’s got a very interesting post on Santa (quoting from an editorial here):

[The children] had been told by adults they trusted that Santa was real. They had seen Santa and talked to him. Santa was everywhere visible and talked about. And Santa delivered! If what they had been told about Santa was not true, then what could they believe? Who could they believe? This was a sobering day. I believe that adults build up Santa for their own pleasure (although they all claim to be doing it for the children.) Conversely children’s souls hunger for the truth. They want to be treated respectfully and taken seriously. (None of us like to be the ones “not in the know.”)

A few thoughts, born from the five responses to his post so far. First, Christ has to be the center of Christmas. Period. He often isn’t, because of our materialistic society that obsessively focuses on gifts instead of the Giver, but that doesn’t mean He shouldn’t be the center. Everything needs to point to Christ. If we really believe in our religion, there’s no way around that. Nor should we want to put something in Christ’s place (an antichrist, really), if we believe. The Alpha and Omega is far more important than Santa or snow or jingle bells or anything else, because He is the only way through which we can overcome sin and death. Santa can’t resurrect people, and mistletoe can’t wipe away the stains of sin.

Second, I think most people would agree that the commercialization of Christmas is a Bad Thing^TM. We need to shift our perspective, to see with new eyes. And there’s no better way to do that than to turn to Christ, who gave all. When we’re focused on the Savior, it’s hard to be taken in by all the glitter and glitz of things, things, things. Things don’t matter. People do. Christ does. Love does.

Third, I completely agree with the editorial in that disillusionment about Santa can have negative repercussions in other areas of belief. Are we really justified in lying to our children? Really? We can tell them stories, of course, and anyone who’s read this blog for more than a few weeks will know that I will root for fiction till my dying day, but we must not — repeat, must not — try to pass these stories off as truth! If truth matters to us as much as we say it does, then the Santa myth has got to go.

Fourth, let me clarify what I mean by “the Santa myth has got to go.” I mean the lie that Santa is real. But I don’t mean that Santa himself has to be booted out of Christmas entirely, any more than the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy should be exterminated. It’s okay — in my mind — to keep Santa around, as long as it’s clear he lives solely in the imaginative realm. For me, thinking of Santa and his elves helps sprinkle some fairy dust over Christmas, adding some sparkles of excitement. And that’s fine. The only real problem arises when those sparkles get in the way of Christmas. They don’t have to. But they often do. If we can’t keep Santa from stealing the scene from the baby Jesus, then it’s time for Santa to exit stage right; if we can keep the focus on Christ, however, then I see no problem with adding a minor character on the stage. Let’s just remember, as Tiny Tim says, “who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

[tags]Christmas, Santa Claus[/tags]

Earlier this evening I called my grandmother to wish her a happy birthday. I’d only intended to talk for five or ten minutes, but I’d been reading Rumors of War (a novel by Dean Hughes set in the first couple of years of WWII) and realized that Grandma had lived during that time. So I asked her about it and I ended up listening to her tell me stories about her life for a full hour, all the while I busily scribbled down notes as fast as I could manage. Ended up with six 3×5″ notebook pages, which I then transferred in 7pt handwriting :) to my genealogy Moleskine, and just now I wrote up the more interesting bits and e-mailed them off to my family.

This is addicting. :)

You’d think that the lives of ordinary people wouldn’t be all that interesting, but it’s quite the opposite. Everyone has stories. And stories are good. For example, here’s how she heard about Pearl Harbor:

When she was 13, she always went to the movies on the weekend with her sister, since the theater was only two blocks away and the movies cost only 35 cents. On December 7th, 1941, she and her sister got out of a movie just as it was getting dark. Ordinarily there were lots of people outside, but on this night the streets were deserted. The two girls got home and found their mother sitting in the dark in front of the radio. “We’re at war,” she told them.

Fascinating stuff, really. Sure, she’s my grandmother, but I think the interest level of stories like this doesn’t have as much to do with relation as you’d think. Or at least the stories have enough intrinsic interest that you can be intrigued by someone else’s story even if they’re not a relative.

I love stories. A lot. So now I’m going to go finish reading Rumors of War because I’ve only got 30 pages to go and I’ve got to find out how it ends. :)

Spent an hour talking with my grandmother on my mom’s side (it was her birthday). I hadn’t planned on more than five minutes, actually, but I’d been reading Dean Hughes’ book Rumors of War (which takes place at the beginning of WWII) and realized that my grandma was alive during the war. So I asked her what it was like for her, and ended up with six pages of notes about not only the war but also how she met my grandfather, and how her sister and brother died. And how her great-grandparents had owned a produce business and one of their delivery boys was Frank Sinatra (who had grown up five miles away). Family history is cool. :)

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I’d be much more motivated to do genealogy if I had a Moleskine notebook devoted solely to that pursuit, so I got one but didn’t start using it till today. Copied in those six pages of notes and it’s great. I’ve got to talk to my grandparents more often so I can capture all these memories before they disappear. (It’s also kind of nice going back to paper and pen, incidentally. I can carry the notebook with me in my pocket wherever I go, and it’s durable and wonderful for this sort of thing. It’s the kind of notebook that Indiana Jones’s dad uses in The Last Crusade, too. ;))

[tags]World War II, family history, Moleskine, Indiana Jones[/tags]

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been teaching myself how to use Blender lately (incidentally, my first and only article for the Linux Journal was on Blender, back in 1999, and I shudder when I re-read it :)). Initially the going was slow, even though I had written an article on the subject once upon a time. It was frustrating. I felt like I was slogging through quicksand.

Then I started reading the manual.

The thought of reading a manual is often boring — at least for me — but I’ve found that the more I read, the clearer everything gets and the more excited I become as I realize how I can leverage the tools to create masterpieces. It’s simple, really, but somehow I’d convinced myself that I could get by without it. Folly. Pure folly. It’s like trying to design a building without knowing about steel and wood and plastics, or like attempting to write a symphony with no knowledge of orchestration and what each instrument can do. Sure, you can do it, but will it be good? Probably not. If it is, it was most likely a fluke, unless you happen to be a once-in-a-lifetime genius.

You know, I probably should go back and read the manuals for Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign. I’ve assumed that I knew all the stuff that mattered, but I’m betting there’s a plethora of undiscovered techniques which will save me time and keystrokes. Let there be light. :)

[tags]Blender, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign[/tags]

Out of curiosity, how many of you have read entire books online? (Etexts, eBooks, whatever you want to call them.) Where? Project Gutenberg? Elsewhere? Did you read them in your web browser, or in a separate etext-reading app, or on a handheld device of some sort?

Before my mission I was an etext fiend. :) I read — no, devoured — Project Gutenberg etexts all the time, and eventually ended up making some of my own. (You can see them at Blank Slate.) Since then, I haven’t done as much with etexts as either reader or creator, so yesterday I headed over to Distributed Proofreaders (which feeds into Project Gutenberg) and proofed a few pages of an Early English Text Society book of Chaucer’s translation of Boethius into Middle English. Lots of of’s in that sentence. :) Anyway, etext creation and consumption is a passion of mine, and it’s something that just so happens to fit in perfectly with a career in librarianship. You’d almost think I planned it that way…

If you’re interested in etexts at all, swing on by to Project Gutenberg and try reading some. There are 19,000+ to choose from, so you’re bound to find something your style. As a bit of background, Project Gutenberg digitizes books that were published before 1923 (as a general rule, anything published in that year or later is still under copyright). It started back in the 70s when Michael Hart typed up the Declaration of Independence, and in the last few years it’s really started to skyrocket. There are volunteers all over the world now who work on digitizing books. It’s marvelous.

For many, reading the etexts alone isn’t enough, and they want to help out. To get a feel for what it’s like to volunteer, check out the Volunteers’ Voices page on the Project Gutenberg website. The easiest way to get started is to register on Distributed Proofreaders (which we’ll refer to as PGDP henceforth) and proof a page or two. Or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand. ;)

If you want to work on your own etext — which is what I did for The Ball and the Cross and An Icelandic Primer and a number of others — you have a few options. You can type it in by hand (I did that for The Ball and the Cross and it took 30-50 hours), scan the pages in and OCR them (which is what I did for An Icelandic Primer, though the scans were already available online), or find existing texts and prepare them for Project Gutenberg (which is what I did for the L.M. Montgomery etexts). The benefit of the latter is that if the original site goes down, the text is still available. (Project Gutenberg won’t be going down anytime soon — there are mirrors all over the world.) Before you start, though, check David Price’s In-Progress List to make sure nobody else is working on it. If somebody has already gotten clearance but it’s been a year or two or three, you can probably take over, as long as you get permission.

You know, I love Project Gutenberg even more now that I’m “publishing” books (Riverglen Press), because I have 19,000+ to choose from. It’s like Christmas and a candy store all rolled into one. :)

[tags]Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders, etexts, ebooks[/tags]

First, a blast from the past: this week a year ago I was blogging about my favorite things, designing my first book, and posting my first (and only) vlog entry.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming. I suppose this is somewhat regularly scheduled, but it’s not exactly regular — there aren’t many unifying themes (at least that I’ve been aware of). Randomness is good. And that brings me to the topic of this post.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I’ve been planning to start a web magazine called Random: A Little Bit of Everything. Nothing too complicated (or serious, for that matter), more for fun than for anything else. And I’ve missed designing magazine layouts (I was editor/designer for the literary magazine in high school), and I’ve never started my own magazine before, so it was a no-brainer.

What kind of a magazine will it be? An eclectic one. The grab bag of magazines. Will it work? I have no idea. But it doesn’t hurt to try. It’ll only be published as a PDF — at least at first — and if it works then I’ll add an HTML front and perhaps eventually go paper. But for now I’m fine with just PDF.

Now, I could come up with all of the content myself, but that’d be boring (and exhausting). So I’m opening it up to submissions from any and all who are interested. E-mail me (my e-mail’s in the sidebar) with your material. Only digital submissions are allowed. The deadline for the first issue is Christmas Day at 4:53 p.m. (Why not? ;)) Unless I get enough material before then, that is. We’ll see. Articles, short stories, plays, how-tos, poetry, puzzles, news, reviews, art, and anything else you can think up — it’s all welcome. Tone-wise, too. Funny, sad, happy, somber, whatever. I’ll probably be asking some of you bloggers for permission to reprint posts I think would fit, by the way.

This doesn’t mean that I’ll publish anything and everything I get, of course. Only material I consider appropriate will be “printed,” and if something isn’t quite up to par then I’ll work with the creator to get it there, but in all reality I don’t foresee much of a problem. It’s a nice opportunity to see your name in print. Oh, the magazine will be licensed under a Creative Commons license, but authors will retain ownership to their works and will be able to further restrict the rights on a particular work if they so desire. Andsince it’s a voluntary, for-free thing, there won’t be any remuneration for accepted submissions. Sorry. :)

Having said all this, a little voice is whispering, “But what if nobody submits anything?” My reply: then it’ll be a short magazine. :)