An Author is Me

"Kyras-Camera-High-Dive 061" by flickr user JoshSchulz


I spent the holiday weekend making a mess on our dining room table, and after much tweaking and pixel-pushing and fishing around for compliments, I pulled the trigger: One Last Quest is purchasable, at least electronically. That's one small step for (a) man, one more leap for the Typosphere. (Just following in Mr. Speegle's footsteps, here.) Now I sit back and recoil in horror at all the typos that slid by undetected.


Click me for a more humorous tomorrow

Can't sit for long, though. I'm already reading through the formatting guide to upload directly to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Formatting for Smashwords is very particular, and I hope that I can use the same file -- or a slightly tweaked version -- to handle the other two sites. And then I need to figure out if I'm going to resurrect the print version that I proofed oh-so-long ago.

The only scary part is the jump...

Lo-Fi Update

More from the digital keychain cam. The best shots seem to be the ones I plan the least: I've discovered that the lens (if you can call it that) is sitting off-center in the housing of the camera, so any attempt I make to line up a shot is doomed to fail. I'm forced to just shoot and move, shoot and move... I don't know if I'd call the experience "Zen" but it's certainly a pleasure, trying to spot those scenes that would make an interesting shot, and then seeing how the camera "interprets" that vision.

One rule I've made for myself is "no correction or cropping." Except for the occasional black and white conversion, these shots are "SOOC," or "straight out of the camera." I'm not a purist about photographs, and I believe a little conscious tweaking of parameters or exposure times or filters is part of the art form that is photography. I am not a photojournalist, and I am not documenting without introducing my own prejudice into the images. The selection of a subject and the first cut of photos to save or rejectt introduces my own bias. Instead, I consider this exercise a surrender of control and an embracing of chance, a challenge for myself to see the unexpected and the unusual even in my familiar daily walk. All of the shots I've posted in this series are from the same four-block area around my office building. Ever time I set out with the camera in my pocket, I feel like I've exhausted the possibilities: that I've shot everything there is to shoot. Luckily, I've been wrong each time.

Today's Lo Fi Highlights

More from the $5 Walgreens keychain digicam:

(my favorite of the bunch)

Plus, a few a took yesterday that somehow got glitched up in the camera's memory, giving them the Ted Turner effect.

UPDATE: here's the camera on a Post-It note, for a size comparison.

What's black and white and foggy all over?

It's the winter slump time with foggy cool mornings making it hard to get up out of bed, and harder to face the day. I can't even see out the window this morning, but this was the view yesterday.

Passed along the Classic 12 to another one of my son's friends after my wife and I discussed the curse of Perfectionism that seems to settle in over boys of this age, dense and impenetrable like our morning fog. I suppose it's just another taste of the upcoming teenage years: suddenly we're dealing with peer pressure, and fretting about hair and clothes and shoes and the "right" way to carry backpacks to school (dragging them nonchalantly behind on the way to class, apparently.) Like my own son, the Classic's new owner struggles with writing assignments, grappling with the idea that he's allowed to write what he wants, and not to try to write what he thinks his teacher wants. It's a hard lesson, when the world is very black-and-white and wrapped in fog. I hope the Classic helps him out. Manual typewriters are perfectly non-judgemental, they don't beep or blip or underline when you've made a gaffe, they're just happy to serve you and wait on you, as long as you keep them well-fed with paper and ribbons. The perfect companion! The new owner was well-pleased with the Classic's paper "ears", its Power Spacer key, and the magic of the typebar unjammer. I don't know if it will help him out of the fog, but I hope it'll be a good companion as he works his way through it.

The Thinkening