Lisa's amazing world of nonfiction stuff
Lisa is teaching a QM class (again) and earnestly working on getting the actual worky icky parts of her dissertation done and ready to collect data. It's actually kind of scary having someone I can have a conversation about being published and working on writing with that's on the same page I am...
Lisa is also at a good place in terms of conferences she's got three proposals out with co-author/presenters with words like doctor and assistant dean in their titles. And one to present her dissertation research in the fall (the data should be collected by then...). It will be interesting to see where things go with her conference stuff this year.
Johnson Farm (or... the story gets stranger)
Things have not exactly been quiet on my side of the office either... Last week I finished the final draft of my NANOWRIMO novel Johnson Farm (that is the final draft before I start letting people read it...). This one I finished the pass in about three days (I worked 150 pages last Thursday).
Now, what happens?
Next week (at the beginning of the month) I'm going to be handing copies of the text off to a couple of select readers to be looked over (not Lisa this time, she's got her own stuff and a couple scripts of mine to look over). And this is where things get really exciting...
One of the readers is a young artist here in the area and the first entrant into a little project/competition I'm putting together. The challenge is to read the book and create a piece of cover art for it. I'm actually planning on recruiting a small group of artists to do this with the best (or at least my favorite) three covers being selected as limited edition covers for the first run of the book. I would like to promote the work of young and up and coming artists and giving a few of them a shot at a book cover seems like a good way to do it.
This first cover will be sort of a test case and example for the others I'm hoping to recruit. I'm going with this particular person because she's a local so I can talk with her pretty easily during the process; she's a fast reader; and I like her stuff (Note that there are other artists who fit two or more of those qualifications, unfortunately the ones that read this blog tend not to be local and/or are rather busy and I'd like to have something on hand around the time I'm finished with next months madness with the chainmail book...).
As for the other readers and artist/readers for the first wave... well, I haven't really had time to figure that out. Between editing the book, doing two blogs, the ward boundary realignment and a couple of non fiction projects I've been slightly busy...
The good news is that the crew I'm putting together is helping and things are coming in almost/semi/sort of on schedule. Though I really need somebody to man the camera for some videos (torch in one hand, camera in the other... not good).
I'm hoping to have Johnson Farm out in the fall and the chainmail bottle carriers book is still on line for April release (but I do need to get those videos done...)
That's the big news for this week.
Until next time...
Don't worry the team is on hand to make sure I don't do anything really drastic (and to guard the soda supply :P
