Using My Design Skills

It was a very design-y day for me. I created a new iteration for LOTA, which meant putting margin art into place and scooting things around to make spaces for footnotes. Then I print out a new copy and hand it back to Howard who is working on filling up the remaining white spaces.

Howard made some critique notes for Strength of Wild Horses, so I applied those and created another iteration of that too. I really wanted to send it off to the printer tomorrow, but I think the earliest possible is Monday. I have to walk away from design projects and come back to them in order to see what I am missing. I also have to look at things both on paper and on screen. I see different issues in the different formats.

When my brain was worn out on SWH, I did some rough layout work for Massively Parallel. This pass is mostly to slap strips into place and come up with a page count. We’re hoping to have this book in print before the big summer conventions, so we have no time to dawdle. Howard needs the page count so he knows what space he has to work with for the bonus story.

Then it was time to pick up kids, help kids with homework, and provide dinner. Except I spent 90 minutes watching episodes of Community because my brain was too fried for focus. The good news is that when I re-emerged the kids settled into their homework and they were content with a frozen food dinner.

I had some time to spare while I was supervising homework, so I finished reading through the submissions for the challenge coin PDF. This also required my design brain because I have to figure out how to fit all of these different stories into a cohesive document that is readable. Fortunately I think I’ve got it figured out, now I just need to look up some examples of what I have in mind to make sure that I do it well. Some of the stories made me laugh, others brought me to tears. This is a worthy project and I feel honored to be part of it.

It was a long and thinky day. Now I need to go to bed so I can have another one like it tomorrow.