the final countdown

LAST BLOG ENTRY! I am presenting the second Thursday of presentations during 9th period. I am really excited that my senior project is wrapping up soo nicely. I have my stories all done, except my mentor will read them over to put the cherry on top. My book in InDesign is exactly how I pictured it. Monday and Tuesday, since my brother and sister have school, I have all the quiet time I need to finish my book and send it in on Wednesday. I will have my book by the time we get back to school. Over break I will be working on putting the exhibition video together and slideshow.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEARS!

STRESSS

This week was just stressful and wrapped up with me getting sick. I want to say i got sick from stress. This book has turned to be harder to put together than i thought. Initially i hoped to finish by the 19th so I could just have it standard shipped. I had to figure out what day was the last day I could sent it to publishing with express shipping so that i can still get it in time. That day is the 23rd. This makes me feel a little better. I ended up working with InDesign because BookSmart was too restricted and I'm going to send it to blurb as a PDF. Right now I am focused on figuring out the things I know I won't be able to figure out so I can take to publishing about before the break. Overall, I do enjoy what I am doing but i didn't expect it to be as complicated as it is to make it as personal as i want it to be.

and now my favorite part

after weeks of creating, editing, deleting, and headaches I have finally complete my thirty stories. At this point the only thing left for them to be final revisions is for my mentor to read through and edit/comment and for my outside consultant to give me the seal of approval. Over the break i started doing my favorite and anticipated part. Although, it might be the most challenging because i have never done this, I knew that it would end up being the easiest in terms of making myself sit down and work and the part I'd have the most fun with. This is the digital creation and graphic design of the book. After extensive research I finally concluded that Blurb would be my publisher, but Blurb does not work with InDesign. Blurb has it's own book publishing program called BookSmart. Although I know Blurb will get my book right, they are more expensive than Lulu and my work isn't saved onto my computer it is uploaded to their site. So, if BookSmart or Blurb were to crash, I would not have a backup file. Since BookSmart is user friendly, i actually find it harder to work with because it is that straightforward. My biggest worry was realizing that it would take me longer than what I had expected because this was all new to me. But I knew that if i created the book first and then the stories to go along with it I would not have completed my book in time. While going through my process folio and my calendar I have decided to make a short video and slideshow (which I'll make over christmas break from the over 3000 pictures and over 4 hours of footage I have) to go along with my book for presentation. I had mentioned early that no matter how well I described an event in my book, it would never be close to doing justice to what actually happened. After talking to Sylvia about this and she told me of her plan to do a model of the homestead. Thus, we wanted to have my book and her paper next to each other with the video/slideshow playing behind them and hopefully the model nearby.