I have been making an effort to proceed slowly with The Lilac Years. It has not been easy—once I start a new book, my inclination is to get it out into the world before I change my mind—but I am staying the course, as they used to say. Continue reading
Here is my latest draft of the cover for The Lilac Years:
I had placeholder text on the back that I needed to replace with something. Rather than add a blurb, preview one of the poems, or keep it all minimalist and get rid of the text altogether, I decided to add the list of words. I figure it gives some idea of what is in the book, piques curiosity (what are ‘wombats’ and ‘Harvey Keitel’ doing in a poetry collection?), and, in calling to mind those children’s books that list their vocabularies, adds an element of whimsy. I will sit with this for a couple of days before deciding whether or not to keep it—I am still waiting to hear about a couple of poems I have submitted to journals anyway.
Stay tuned!
(17 November 2017)
Starting to arrange the order of the poems for The Lilac Years…
(7 November 2017)
I did not realize until just a moment ago that it is already past midnight. That’s because I have started on The Lilac Years at last, doing the copy-and-paste from my Word documents into InDesign, and working on the basic layout.
Below are screenshots of a few of the spreads. So far, the main drawback to putting the titles at the bottom of the page is that longer titles are a bit troublesome. What I have been doing is to keep the titles their full size (Clarendon 13/15) as long as they fit within two lines; once they go to three, I fit what makes sense on the first line, then make the rest of the title smaller (8/11) so that it fits on the second line.
Of course, if I scrap this particular iteration, I won’t have to worry about any of that—but I’m going to place all the poems in InDesign first. Then the fun can begin.
Stay tuned!
(2 November 2017)
My next self-published opus is still a ways away, since I took some poems out of the running temporarily by entering them in competitions (one for a chapbook, one for a full-length book). But I’m not letting that stop me from drafting some possibilities for the cover.
When I talked about working titles a while back, I jokingly mentioned Fred: The Lilac Years as a possibility. Well, except for the Fred part, I have decided to go with that. Here are some of the drafts I have come up with so far: Continue reading
Ordinary Average Thoughts 