2:38 a.m. I'm feeling so totally smug and accomplished; it's a sight to behold. I've labored mightily for the last several hours and I have actually created my very first ever cover for a book. At least, I think I have.

I'm going to hustle it off to the printer at the crack of dawn and then we'll see what happens. Oh, it may go through. I've got official-looking fake crop marks on the thing and I've picked out some kind of Pantone color selections that sounded authentic enough for me.

All in all, it looks like the real thing to me. Now, I didn't draw or in any way create the art on the cover -- no, what I did tonight was to lay the thing out and slap on the type. I had to learn a certain amount of new stuff on the way, and that's where the crunch was all day today.

For example, there was the possibility that I would have to go into the innards of my poor, over-improved machine's memory and futz around with things having to do with virtual and scratch disks and irreversible stuff like that. It didn't come to that, and I was glad.

I had enough time to watch Ally McPink tonight, inbetween .eps renderings. Someone is painting bright cotton-kandy kissame lipstick on her and someone else has the job of trying to fluff up her poor lank hair. She even wore two outfits that were sleeveless, and that was fun.

And then, back to the salt mines. There are grids and there is kerning. I had to figure out how to turn a bit of type around on its axis, and forty-five degree angles -- remember geometry? I don't. I remember the saddle shoes we had to wear and a very quiet, sensitive girl who suddenly had an epileptic fit when she was told she had to stay after school.

It was early in the school year and I'd never even noticed her before and now here she was, on the floor, scuffing the sides of her brand new saddle shoes against the door jamb. She had red hair and freckles and pale, pale skin.

I also had to try to remember how to add up fractions and turn them into decimals. Our freshman math class had a funny tinge to it that whole semester after that poor girl named Mary was carried out by the janitor and her bulging school bag was left behind next to her empty chair.

The arm on my nun doll fell off today. Her eyes follow me wherever I am in the room. It's uncanny. I'm going to have to go under her black shiny dress and look for the rubber band that holds her limbs in place. She's getting pretty old.

Lots of different women on the Ally show, but not a one of them will ever fall to the floor in a fit or loose a limb to old age. Yet, that's what we were really taught in school, along with the occasional bit of long division and conjugation. Some lessons remain.

And what do our little girls learn today? Fragile stick-figure arms and freckles (Pantone #6-CIV) against parchment skin. Tongues disappearing down throats and small wooden rulers. Trying to find the right angle to use, in a fraction of the time allotted.

Good old golden-rule days.