Thursday, October 19, 2006

T-13

Coffee in the Chicago skyline mug, "Cloudy This Morning" by George Winston on iTunes, 1771 words (about 4 pages out of a planned 16) written in the kilnforming section of the book. I'm late posting this morning, but I already have a kiln load in so nyah, nyah. Yesterday when I looked at the oval melt I did the day before I decided it was way to dark for the book--the coral almost all reacted with the French vanilla so it is pretty black. So instead of doing the bubble-fix fuse on it yesterday, I did another melt. It is *gorgeous* and lighter colored (coral tint, clear, a bit of coral opal, a bit of coral, apricot opal, and a smidge of French vanilla for black lines and interest). I ground the edges and both ovals are now in Kiln #2 for a bubble fix.

Today is an errand day--Thursday usually is--with a leg wax for me and gymnastics for the J. I may even squeeze in a pedicure (isn't my life tough?). I can justify the pedicure as I will take my laptop to it (and to gymnastics) and sit and write the whole time--no loss of writing time and I will be able to write at least another four pages. Besides writing I need to ship a load to the Art Institute and put in another large fuse load of Pop Art pieces in the big kiln. I also need to start putting together another order for Bullseye and one for Ed Hoy's (my other wholesale supplier in Chicago). I am about out of thinfire and fiber paper, and thanks to the additional orders from the Art Institute I am also low on some of my frit colors. Finally, I need to buy enough stands for the 2-D panel pieces for the show I have at Taylor Kinzel in November and the One of a Kind Show in Chicago.

News from the publisher on the whole where-are-we-going-to-photograph-the-projects issue is pretty good. They are letting it drop until there is an art director assigned to my book. I am not sure why they felt they had to get my projects up there asap if there isn't even an art director assigned to work on them yet, but so be it. Other news from them is not so good. Ever since the beginning of this project the editor has been giving me guidelines for number of words and photos per page. I have been following them. In fact, in the beginning I even needed to pad my estimates so that I could show enough words to fill the book.

Yesterday I got a n updated copy of the page count spreadsheet they initially gave me to work from. It has a new column called 'rounded page count' (in addition to the 'raw page count' already there). The raw page count says the book is estimated at a total page count of 124.75 pages. I am shooting for 144 so so far, so good. However the rounded page count shows me at 156.5 pages--or already 12 pages over. I would think they have been doing this long enough that the page-planning documents they provide their authors to track their work would have better than a 25% margin of error... but maybe I would be mistaken. Not sure what they would like me to do about it now so I am going to just keep on writing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Don't forget that the publishing house is just another form of bureaucracy, and they do things just because that's the way they do it. Most likely, they assign the Art Director of a project based on whoever happens to be nearby when the photo shoot starts.