My sister and brother-in-law sent me the following birthday card:
Thanks, Anne and Herb!
Tea Lake Bridge
In the old Devilbunny story segments, I reference Tea Lake campground and bridge in Algonquin Park. My sister introduced me to camping there, in the form of car camping at the Tea Lake campground. I found a picture with the bridge in the background. This picture is taken at the little beach by the campground. This would have been in the late eighties.
A Timeline for “Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!”
The story is a prequel to The Rabbit Hole. As such, it has to end with Dimples working in the troll farm under the supervision of the rabbits.
It starts out with the events in several story segments that I wrote ages ago, which I posted to Usenet.
Continue readingJacket text for “Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!”
I am working through a series of exercises with Jackie on planning Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!. Step 4 involves writing ‘jacket text’ for the story. This is the text that might appear on the back of the book, or on the front flap of a dust jacket. It’s a kind of marketing text intended to draw the readers interest.
So for, I’ve come up with this:
A hidden society of supremacists is trying to take over the world. They are outnumbered by the rest of us, yet they believe that their strength, intelligence, weaponry, and general cuteness give them the right to rule us all. Yes, cuteness… for these supremacists are rabbits.
Years ago, Tom Johnson and his parents had fled the rabbits’ captivity to build a new life on the outside. Tom’s father had gone back in later to rescue other humans from the rabbits’ totalitarian nightmare… and never returned.Now, Tom was in high school. But his earliest memories were of the safe predictable environment that the rabbits provided for their human guests. He remembered the rabbits’ soft fur and cute little voices, and their warmth and love… and he looked around at the harsh world of high school, the bullying and endless struggle, and he knew he had to leave.
First attempt at a cover for The Lonely Little Fridge!
This is my first attempt at laying out the cover for The Lonely Little Fridge. The artwork is india ink over pencil sketches on paper.
Because the artwork was largeish (2 panels 8.5 inches square, plus a 0.25-inch spine between), I scanned it in five pieces using VueScan. Then I opened all the pieces in Photoshop and assembled them into one image there. Because the linework is so sparse, Photoshop’s auto-align function didn’t have enough to work with, so I aligned by hand and used the auto-blend function to smooth things out. Then I used Levels to expand the dynamic range, smashing light greys toward white and dark greys toward black.
IngramSpark provides templates for each size and type of cover they offer. This cover will be case-bound, with a page trim size of 8.5 inches square. One of the templates is an InDesign file, so I built the cover on it, inserting the artwork and text on layers between the ISBN layer and the layer with guides and printed info.
Once I get the artwork coloured (via Viviva watercolours), I will scan it again and do this all over again!
Locations for “The Rabbit Hole”
The original alt.devilbunnies story postings that provided the characters I reference in The Rabbit Hole mentioned Kingston, Ontario, Canada. When I was writing the story, I needed to firm up my knowledge of the locations. So here are some of the locations:
- The motel where the Aduins live is based on a motel on Old Highway 2, west of downtown Kingston. 3100 Princess Street.
- The house where Landon lives does not actually exist. Balaclava Street is real, but 5 Balaclava Street appears to be a driveway or an empty lot.
- The intersection of Princess and Centennial, in all its shopping-plaza-lined glory.
Legal Deposit
When publishing a book in Canada, it is an actual legal requirement to send a copy or two to the national library for their collection.
This applies to printed books, ebooks, serial publications, video and audio recordings, maps, microforms, even sheet music.
The materials go into the national library, and one copy is made available for the public, while the other goes into The Archives.
Preparing to print a hardcover
The Lonely Little Fridge is going to be a hardcover and a fixed-format ebook.
Amazon print-on-demand does not print hardcovers, so I set up an account at IngramSpark (https://www.ingramspark.com/), the publishing platform, who does print hardcovers. They also handle distribution worldwide; bookstores order from them.
In order to print with them, we have to provides all sorts of information, in addition to the actual book files.
Continue readingLanguages, Languages
I am hoping to get my books translated into as many languages as possible.
I’m starting with the smaller ones, with The Lonely Little Fridge to be specific. The actual word count of The Lonely Little Fridge is only around 700, so it should be relatively easy and inexpensive to have it translated.
I’m going to translate it into Esperanto and hopefully have someone else check it. I would very much like it to be translated into French.
I’d also like it to be translated into Indigenous languages, such as Inuktitut (with the syllabic writing). or Kanien’kéha (known to English-speakers as Mohawk) or Anishinaabemowin (known to English-speakers as Ojibwe).
Promotional postcards came!
I ordered some promotional postcards from Package Plus in Peterborough. They came on Monday, and they look really good!
