It is time for a quick update on the final two pieces of this project. Not much has changed, but I'm going to show you pictures of layout process and explain why the delays.
TL;DR: No action items. Audiobook only needs some final editing and an outro. The Activities Notebook needs me to devote some time to layout. Your next update will be the week of February 16-20.
Details
Because of ongoing travel and thus lack of a quiet recording space, Mary Robinette has not yet had a chance to record the outro for the audiobook. She is back home this week and hopefully I'll have the audiobook to release to you before the next update.
I have good news on the Activities book. I've found a way to get high quality, a smaller print run, and a faster turn around. The cost to me will be higher per book, but the over all cost will be less because I won't have to pay for so many extras.
I've been working my way through layout, but the process has been slow. A major reason for the slow is that my freelance work for StoryCon has taken up three times the amount of hours that I had mentally allotted for it. When I planned my January I based my estimates on running the Expo Hall for StoryCon last year, except this year the Expo hall is twice as large and the team I'm working with is larger two. Double the size means 3 times the organizational work.
I'm still sneaking in work on the Activities notebook daily. I'm working from a print out I have in a 3 ring binder on which I've written notes for myself. I tried to pre-think so that when I sit down to do layout I'm just following instructions instead of having to invent ideas.
Unfortunately sometimes I left myself notes like this one. If the picture doesn't load for you, the handwritten note on the page says "Some sort of recording mechanism for tracking these patterns. Be Smart!
Thank you past me.
Mostly though I'm carefully rendering my own instructions. I'm working in InDesign and one very smart thing I did early on was create a set of blue guidelines that help me with placing everything on the page. The very first thing I notice here is that the blue bounding boxes for the text are out of alignment with the blue guidelines. So I fix that. Next I create spaces in the text where I'll place lines for writing. Then I go to an earlier page and copy lines from there so I can past them here. Then I slide the lines into the gaps of the text making sure they're matched to the blue guidelines. I copy paste for each gap. Then I turn off my guides so I can see if everything looks good without them. I notice that the right hand side of the writing lines are a bit ragged. It is the result of this copy paste process during 80 prior pages. A small error gets replicated page to page. I decide to fix it here. So I add a new guide on the right of the text and make sure all the lines end on the guideline. Each line has to be adjusted individually. I'm going to need to do the same through the whole book. I'll make a pass specifically to check and fix that. This is the point where I am painfully aware that there may be tools to help me do this sort of thing in a less labor intensive way. I could spend hours researching and learning tools. Or I can just get this project done. This is one of the hazards of learn-as-you-go. I cling to my process and always feel like I could be doing this better.
Now I'm ready to tackle the next page. My notes say I want two columns, so I scroll back 20 pates to find an earlier page where I've already created that. I copy this column construction and bring it back to the page I'm working on. I turn on the guides so I can get it placed correctly and change the text to what this page needs. Turn the grids off again to check both pages. I've now completed first pass layout on this page spread. I've got about a dozen more page spreads to do. Plus I need to go back and do another 3-4 where I told myself "be smart" and I haven't figured out how to be smart yet.
If I can focus and put in at least an hour per day. I'll be done inside of 10 days. Then I'll print it out for a binder where I make handwritten notes. Second pass layout will be tweaking and refining. The thing I wish I could do is then pay someone with real graphic design training to pretty everything up. But alas, time and money don't allow for that. So this book will be simple and (hopefully) useful.
And with that, I need to get back to work instead of writing about work. :)
Your next update will be the week of February 16-20. Thank you so much for your support. All the best, Sandra Tayler
