Omegacerebro's blog

It's 2:13 am and I just uploaded the finished tutorials and interviews to Dropbox. I was in the process of finishing everything up Saturday evening when we had that power outage in Clemson. I ended up losing some work because I didn't save, but it wasn't a major setback. Although I'd originally intended to have 5 HTML files--the two interviews, book tutorial, template tutorial, and paragraph style tutorial--I ended up with 4. During the process of creating the template tutorial, it became apparent to me that the template and paragraph style instructions should be merged.

I've converted the tutorial into HTML. I thought I was going to need a program like Dreamweaver for this, but fortunately the process was a lot easier than that. Apparently, Word allows documents to be saved in HTML. I checked the file in Chrome and it looked fine, although some formatting was changed. I'll be expanding the tutorial with in-depth explanations of how to create templates (in addition to explaining why you would want to do this in the first place) and how to create paragraph styles. Tomorrow I will do the screen captures for these processes.

This week is a little slow and I'm merely going back over the interviews I did with Keith and Jillian. I'm thinking about doing another one with Keith, simply because my recorder cut him off after about 5 minutes. I'm also going through the inDesign tutorial word document and trying to see which of the steps in the book-making process I should highlight.

I completed my Blurb book today and it was much simpler once I found the solution to the problem I was having last week. The specific problem I was having was with the import feature for Word documents. While Blurb can import .doc files, it cannot import .docx files. A lot of people may be unaware that Word 2007 and 2010 use the .docx format. While it is true that you can ask both 07 and 10 to save as an older Word format, I found out that doing so still doesn't create a .doc file; there is no way to save in that format with 07 or 10.

I'm midway through the process of creating a Blurb book to display for the Book Lab. I'm not sure if it's because I'm so accustomed to creating books in inDesign, but I don't find the Blurb book creation as intuitive as I assumed it would be. Of course, there's nothing really intuitive about inDesign, either, but compared to ComicLife, Blurb isn't as effortless. I think this might be something I'll need to address in a separate Blurb tutorial, assuming I can't find an adequate answer to my admittedly minor problem within the program's help menu or on the website's FAQ page.

I completed my second interview last week, this one featuring Dr. Jillian Weise, making sure that the voice recording wouldn't cut-off mid-interview like it did when I interviewed Keith Morris. Because she was pressed for time and needed a smoke break, the interview was held outside on one of the breezeways between Strode Tower and Daniel Hall. As such, the audio quality is marred by the sound of wind, but both of our voices are still distinguishable. I will attempt to clear the recording up if it is deemed too indecipherable by Dr. Blakesley.

I'm a big fan of technology and I usually go out of my way not to be an outlier in the technological world. That is not to say that I blindly jump on every new technology that pops up (and it seems like the next new thing pops up every other day, now). I like to weigh my options. So, for instance, when the Nintendo DS was released in 2004 promising a revolution in handheld gaming, I waited until 2005 when the PSP came out and bought it, instead.

I've set up an appointment with Keith Morris tomorrow at 2pm and one with Jillian Weise this Wednesday at 1:30 pm. After each interview I will add a word document to the respective folder in the Clemson Book Lab dropbox account. I'm also still trying to acquire a copy of inDesign for the tutorial part of this project.

So far, I've set up an appointment with Keith Morris in order to conduct an interview for the Book Lab. This interview will be a partial spotlight on him as an author, as well as a Q&A for up and coming writers. This Q&A will cover the basics that one needs to go through in order to put together a proper manuscript for submission to journals, how to find an agent, and the general process of composing a novel. I've also reached out to Jillian Weise to provide two published Clemson University authors' perspectives.

When Thompson asked, "[b]ut what exactly are the big books and why are they so important in the field of trade publishing? Why does the preoccupation with big books become a key feature of the logic of the field?" (188), my immediate internal response was, "Duh. Is he serious?" Surely, I thought, Thompson didn't mean to ask that question; the answer was a no-brainer. Big books hopefully make big bucks, and the publishing business is just that, a business; they will naturally put the majority of their effort into these big books.