Wednesday, September 6, 2000

 

1:29 a.m. Working on the old business site, that's what I'm doing. All day long I've been slaving over a hot Photoshop, cutting and pasting and hitting the little keys over and over again. All the images are now trimmed and framed and shadowed and ready to insert.

The scanner's been working all day, too. I'm OCRing text, which means I'm slowly scanning it and letting the computer guess at the letters instead of actually typing the stuff myself. It's day-dreamy work and it is really hard staying in my chair as the slow process unfurls over and over and over again. But. This is what people do.

The illustration that I've posted here is one that I made when we were trying to sell my really cool, really nifty concept of Blank Books. We did end up selling four titles out of a dozen or so that I created with my scanner and my clip-art collection -- and nothing on this page mockup was cleared for copyright infringement because it was a one-time dummy so that the acquisitions editor could get an idea of how the books might look.

The fairy and the letter "H" came from a brochure for expensive children's books, and Howard's head came from a magazine. I was so thrilled with myself for being able to merge the two and to add type to the whole shebang. Plus, there's a nice filmy effect with the background that I stumbled into as I tried to get myself out of the program without doing any permanent damage.

Too bad about the whole Blank Book thing. It was such a great idea, but the company that published them ended up going bankrupt and so now they're merely part of the long and interesting history of Shadow Lawn Press.

The real, professional book cover ended up looking very different:

and lucky for the unlucky press in question, Howard Stern thought it was pretty funny. It helped that the words "a parody" were prominent on both covers and it also helped that we live in a free-enterprise, First Amendment-pretendment society. Now, if the company had stayed in business, there's no telling how big my career in Blank Book parody would have become.

Lined and unlined. I woulda done it all.

As it stands today, I'm thrown right back on the old non-blank books if I want to make a buck. Non-blank books demand those nasty words, arranged just so, and it's such a bother, you know. I have dictionaries in every room of my house, practically, to help me capture those illusive slippery words, and still I run short of them. Bah.

They're running away when I turn the lights on, like so many other squirmy things do. Best we not focus on them and stay peaceful. Maybe they'll come back.