So, Apple has been pushing their “iPad App of the Year” in my face every time I open the app store for the last few weeks. So, because of repetition, I finally broke down and watched the video displaying it (see below).

A very pretty blonde woman attempts to pretend that she’s manipulating the world’s largest wall iPad using Snapseed. Unfortunately, the only thing I got out of that video was that Snapseed can be very hard to use when pretending to use it on a giant wall iPad. Look at her expression when she’s trying to manipulate the photos. It’s as if she was struggling to get her hand in the right place, and then the director would yell “SMILE!” and she’d go “oh yeah, I’m supposed to be having fun!” and smile for a second. After about 4000 takes the crew was tired and the director gave up and just cut it together with what he had.

I started wondering if the only point to the video was to get her model career started, as there seemed to be more images of her than of the app itself.

I then went to my standby app evaluation: go to the app in iTunes (iTunes) and look at the Most Critical reviews first.

Yep, here we are, from slugworthy: 1 star, “WAY overrated”. Slugworthy feels that filterstorm, photoforge2, and photogene2 are “MUCH better.” And hey! I already have those apps! Good, now I can go get an americano at *$ instead!

This December I was busy doing a lot of things, from Disney World with Mark, Jaryth and Mark’s parents, to both our birthdays, to Christmas, to work, and more. But one of the fun things I was doing (okay, all of those things are fun for me) was making some books. These are some of the books I made in December (and early January):

Elves

My mom sent Jaryth some mail art of some elves, and every picture had one elf sticking his foot out. Jaryth does that when he’s crossing the street, to check for cars. And of course the elves cracked my mom up. So she sent us the postcard. I loved the elves so much that I carved a stamp of them. And then made two books about them.

The first book is a carousel book of the elves:

This book was made on cardstock, red, white, and a pink paisley one, with red ribbon. The elves are all stamped from my hand carved elf stamps and colored in with fine point sharpie pens. It was my first attempt at a carousel book.

But I also wanted to tell a story about the elves, and why one of them needed to point his feet at danger. So I wrote a story about it. This book was made on artist paper with cardstock facing paper. The cover is bookboard covered with some fancy paper I got in Seattle. The illustrations are hand carved elf stamps, watercolor pencils, sharpie pens, and a red felt hat for the main character.

Pandas and Turtles

Then yesterday I suddenly was inspired to carve a tiny (about 1″ by 1″) panda face, which made me want to do a book with it. This is a miniature book only 1 1/8 inches square, you can see from the first photo it’s only a little larger than a quarter. It has sewn bindings and is drawn and stamped on white watercolor paper. I used two hand carved stamps and colored pencils to draw in the book and gel pen for the writing.

So far, everyone I’ve spoken to this weekend has asked me if I’m going to dress Jaryth up for Halloween. Up until today, I’ve been telling people my idea is to rip some of his older shirts and pants, put some black splotches on his face and call him “zombie toddler” and leave it at that.

But the real answer is “no.” He’s 3 1/2 years old and he has no idea what Halloween is. He’s excited that I had some Tootsie rolls on the table tonight so he could have some “choc-wat” but beyond that tomorrow is just another Monday to him. Actually, it’s just another weekday, as our routine isn’t all that different except for the time he wakes us up in the morning.

Does this make me a Halloween Scrooge?

My brother sounded almost shocked when I said I wasn’t going to take him out to beg for candy. I’d be amazed if anyone in our neighborhood even has any candy to give out. The last two years we’ve gotten zero children asking for candy. We have a few M&Ms in case that trend doesn’t continue, but I’m betting we’ll have just as many M&Ms at the end of the evening as we do right now. Unless, of course, I eat some…

Cover of my 2011 Holiday Book

This is the outside. On the inside it’s blank except for the instructions. The idea is that everyone who gets a book can then customize it with their own family memories. I’ll be taking mine to Thanksgiving this year to get people to write in it.

The inside of the holiday book for 2011

I’m doing the proof edit of my book, this is my last chance to fix typos or correct errors.

Naively, I thought there wouldn’t be very many because I’d already had my draft copies (written in Pages and converted to Word) reviewed by me, two tech editors, my acquisitions editor, my development editor, my copy editor, and me again.

HOLY SHIT! was I ever wrong.

You see, whenever the copy editor made a change to one of my headlines, that resulted in crazy stuff happening in the Word conversion. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t seeing it in my copy of the .doc files, but when it would get to the production department, they’d be left with headlines that read such things as:

What What What

and my personal favorite, two sections in a row titled:

Choosing

Now, I’m all for choosing and asking questions, but that’s not what my book was trying to say.

So now I’m working on a chapter with a long table of commands. These commands are case-sensitive. But however my document was imported, some of those commands went from lowercase to title case. In other words: <code>create link</code> became <code>Createlink</code> and so on. This was probably some auto-capitalizing feature in whatever program they were using to convert my .doc files into the production-ready files. But it’s still upsetting.

I Can’t Even Imagine Proofreading a Document Submitted in Longhand!

And there was a time when all books were written in longhand and some poor (probably underpaid) person was expected to convert the writer’s (almost certainly) illegible writing into print blocks. I feel very sorry for that person.

Then they moved to typewriters, and the author probably received a galley printing of their work that they were expected to read through and correct. I can imagine, extrapolating from the number of errors I find today—using computers—that approximately every tenth word was written correctly in the galleys. I, like many writers I know, hate to edit and proofread. (Thus I come rant about it here…) But I am thanking my lucky stars that I was born in the era of the computer. That seems like it’s made it at least slightly easier.

I Promise to Never Whine About a Typo Again

Okay, I’ll continue to whine about lame errors online, but I won’t whine about errors in print books. I reserve judgement on ebooks until my book comes out in ebook form and I have to start cringing because of all the errors there… ☺ But hopefully, I’m catching most of the errors in this book. I’m sure there is at least one really horribly egregious one that I haven’t caught and will go all the way through to the second or third edition. But I hope not.