samedi 1 juillet 2006

Back after a long break... Another book edited and published I only have a couple of weeks in a quiet backwater of the Indre-et-Loire département of France before hopping around some other parts of the country from mid-July until early September... so I'll be going from being on-line only once a week recently to being off-line for probably a couple of months. I'll be back in the same hamlet though for another year as I want to do quite a lot of illustrations, text editing and layouts for my closest friend, Amanda, who has at least two books for children (and their parents) to publish. As with her first three Self-help and "inspiration" books we have worked on this year, they will be self-published... and better for it because we have total control over them. Amanda went to the Bologna Book Fair and although some publishers liked her work they were not prepared to take the risk... so she is publishing them herself because the risks only existed in their closed minds and conventions. Have a look at the three books we've taken through the production process in the past month... three books published within a month by a new author is an interesting statistic, but not one to dwell on. The third one entitled "Blossoms on a Tree" was published a couple of weeks ago after a delay due to the artist (me) not finishing the water-colour painted illustrations to our liking after they had been converted to monochrome at the reduced scale necessary for Lulu's 6x9 inch book format. The above detail from the cover image of a Dog Rose was painted in the garden where I'm staying at the moment. Why didn't I simply take a photograph? Well, I'm getting more enjoyment and satisfaction with a paintbrush than with a camera right now, and haven't picked up the Nikon D200 and 12-24mm lens I purchased at the beginning of June... for a week! I'm already thinking this doesn't bode well for my reluctant, delayed (or reluctantly delayed?) introduction to digital photography... but I need time to adjust my thinking on what I want from photography rather than just going out and clicking-away at random. I've even thought that perhaps all that I want from photography is to have a selection of other people's images to look at... as I'm writing this I'm thinking of an unforgettable folio of Burkhard Kiegeland's 12x20 inch contact prints taken around Salzburg. Burkhard is the maker of Lotus View Cameras in formats ranging from 5x4 inches to 20x24 inches... his vision is remarkable, his prints sublime and his cameras beautiful creations for traditional photography... or digital if working from large format negatives scanned and printed to even larger sizes. But back to Amanda... she is a very good writer and her words have made so much sense to me that my life (way of being) and attitudes (no more negative thoughts) have radically changed for the better... all three books - "The Pieces of The Puzzle", "Things To Think About" and "Blossoms on a Tree" - are very positive, peaceful and uplifting. Are all your friends positive thinkers? Do they need help to find their Self? There are so many people in this world who seek help but don't fully realise how they can help themselves and find a true friend... it's all in "The Pieces of The Puzzle". If you want to know more click on Amanda Olivier then on any of the three book titles to read more... if you like what you see pass on her website link to anybody and everybody you know who could do with a new start in their life, or who looking for the answers to their problems. Amanda deserves great success with her books which are compiled from her writings from the past four decades... they apply and appeal to people of all ages, and have helped me more than I feel able to express... my words would not do her words justice! As for my own work, in the next week, before I travel around, I'll be publishing the first of four e-books (on Lulu.com) which have been taken from my weblog. With around 200 articles on Salon.com I thought it a good idea to compile them into e-books of 50 articles each... so my weblogs 1-50 (including the first of my self-portrait nude images... with more rude shots to follow!) will be my first 148 page e-book with 132 images and around 40,000 words of text. I'll probably ask something like $7 per e-publication... 7 is a very good number... and in dollars will be loose change to many people... all I have to work out is how to compress the file for both upload and download whilst retaining good quality for printing-out... the pdf file is 19.8mg at the moment! 5:40:26 PM    comment []