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I sat up and dragged the wood-lined golden lid of Amenhote’s sarcophagus over us. In the intimate darkness, Weena began crooning a petition. I shut my eyes and let her words filter in.

Time, jivas, space and goo
Yuels, zickzack, kessence too
Flimsy goddess old and new
My blank future calls to you.

She sang it over and over—at some point I began singing along, first mumbling the words, then chanting them quite loud. Our two voices overlaid each other, making dissonant beats.

A slight amount of light leaked in through the crack where the lid rested on the casket. Mostly the light was yellow, but as we chanted, I began seeing the hue change, slowly sliding down into red and up into blue, over and over, in synch with our chant. I was beginning to see tiny bright dots—perhaps these were the electrons in the atoms of the air.

Weena and I sang on, bathed in the sea of electrons. Weena’s voice was very beautiful—sweet and thin and filigreed. I don’t know how much time passed, but at some point I felt fully rested. I stopped chanting and sat up. By rights, I should have bumped against the lid and knocked it to the floor. But I didn’t. I passed right through it.

I was sticking up from Amenhotep’s casket, half out of my flesh body. How very strange. I swung my legs to one side, right through the casket walls, and now I was standing on the floor.

Thanks for everything in 2009, and have an awesome 2010.

Beth
CW 09

I spent a half hour this morning looking at Blurb’s book-design ware, Book Smart. They don’t seem to make it all that easy to use non-standard shapes for the image-containing blocks—something I want because I tend to crop most of my images away from standard aspect in Photoshop.

So if I’m gonna be tweaking on a book’s layout a lot, I still think it’s easier for me to do it in Microsoft Word or maybe in Adobe InDesign. These are heavy-duty apps and in either one you can save off a PDF for printing.

This said, I’d be happy if I could find a non-brainer self-publishing app that is smart enough to automatically respect my choices of image aspect…

How do you do it? I’ve seen some of your photo books and I think you have non-standard aspect ratios in there, don’t you?

Later…Okay, I thought of an automated fix. I write an Adobe Photoshop script that resizes the CANVAS of an image to be in a standard photobook aspect…adding white around the edges of the image as necessary. And then I batch-run this on all my intended photobook images, and let some braindead photobook maker flow them into the book. Presumably the whitespaces are preserved and my photos don’t get cropped.

Of course now I have to learn how to write a Photoshop script? (Classic programmer thing of spending days of hacking to save an hour of drudgery.) Actually I found a Java script that I was able to edit pretty easily to do the canvas resize … it was a “Photo Border Script” at http://www.oblius.com I’m not sure though if I want to bother with this.

Have you ever considered selling your prints, and cards with your prints on them, via Etsy (etsy.com)? I think that they would sell really well over there.

Happy New Year,
Ellen