64 Arts

Let’s Start At the Very Beginning

64 Arts

I’ve heard it’s a very good place to start…

Now that I’ve gotten that stuck in everyone’s head, how about we move on to our topic, today:

32 The art of telling stories

Do you consider yourself a good storyteller?

As bloggers, we tell stories with each post. Simply put, a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Some masterful storytellers can tell a story by starting at the end and working their way back–but that takes a tremendous amount of skill.

Me, I can usually find a pretty good beginning (certainly better than the old dark-and-stormy-night trope), get in all the necessary details for the middle but by the end, I’m usually wrapping things up abruptly. I need to work on my endings.

This is probably why I found the comics for the cookbook more difficult to write and execute compared to my webcomics that can go on as long as they need to.

Even still, comics need a beginning and an end. The middle is fuzzy ground in humor, where the important parts are the set-up and the punchline. Still, a middle can draw out the anticipation a bit, so to overlook it would be doing yourself and your readers a disservice.

When working on longer stories–novel length, for instance–the best advice I’ve ever read was back in my NaNoWriMo days. If you ever get stuck, just ask yourself (or your character): and then what happened?

A fellow blogger that serializes her own stories, Miranda of A Duck in Her Pond, she could probably teach us all a thing or three about writing whimsical stories that keep us, the readers, asking just that question.

But now I have a question for you:

Who do you read when you want a really great story?

A Book of Well-Wishes

64 Arts

Thank you for your patience, last week, while I worked on the cookbook. You’ll be happy to know (I hope!) that the week off from blogging helped me accomplish the lion’s share of the editing I was faced with. If you want to secure your own copy of What to Feed Your Raiding Party at a discount, I’ve opened pre-orders here.

Now, as promised, back to our regularly-scheduled creativity!

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Since before Todd and I got engaged, I’ve been a constant reader of Weddingbee.com. Even though it’s wedding-centric, many of the DIY projects the blogger-bees present have applications far-exceeding the wedding world.

Last week, Miss Coyote (each bride-to-bee has their own moniker) posted about making a simply-bound book from all the cards she received at her bridal shower. And I thought to myself, Self, you could do that!

Here’s how the cards I’ve received over the past year and bit are usually displayed at home, in the folded French memo screen outside my door (folded because I have no place, currently, to display it fully extended).

Cards displayed on French Memo Screen

This is all well and good (and what I designed the screen for), but after a while it starts to get full and I keep knocking into some of the larger cards at swinging-hand height as I exit my office. Many people would just toss them but Todd is especially good at picking out awesome cards for holidays and birthdays.

In case you didn’t click over to weddingbee, Miss Coyote tried rings, first, but settled on ribbon to bind her cards together through punched holes. I’ve shown both with the image below, using some spare cards I had lying around.

Ring and Ribbon-bound cards

I wanted something a little less intrusive to the cards’ fronts and, since the current art is bookbinding, this seemed the optimal time to dust off my rusty stitched binding skills.

I knew of Coptic or Chain Stitch book binding, but all my sources used it with a cover–another thing I didn’t want to fool with. By the power of Google I finally found this awesome tutorial of how to do cover-less coptic stitch binding and it got me where I needed to go. I’ll leave the curious to check out that link for themselves, and show you the early steps you’ll need before the stitching takes place.

First put your cards in the order you want them (I opted for more-or-less chronological) and, if all different sizes, get the bottom corners to all match up. Clamp them together so you’ve got your hands free for the next steps.

The clamped cards

Figure out your shortest card and measure the length of it. Mine was just a smidgen under 6 inches. Make a mark 5/8 inch or 1.5 cm or so from the top and bottom of this shortest card. You want an even number of holes, so divide the space between those first two marks evenly. I didn’t bother with exact math, just eyeballed it. It’s okay.

Cards marked for cutting

Now you have to make the holes. You can punch each spine individually, but that’s time consuming. Instead, I suggest a small saw across the width of the spine. I couldn’t find my hacksaw (it might have gotten tossed in the last move) and Todd didn’t have one, but he DID have an amazing idea: a pumpkin carving saw! It worked perfectly. Just make sure you make enough passes that you make it through all the card spines.

The cards, after being cut along their spines with a pumpkin saw

Once that’s done, unclamp the cards and check each spine to make sure it’s got all 4 (or however many) holes. If not, use the mini-saw or a needle to punch through in the right spots.

Checking from the inside of each card that the holes were cut all the way through

After that, start your stitching. My card book has 19 signatures (cards, in this case, in a book it would be folded sections of pages) and it took a single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix to sew them. If I’d owned a curved needle (it helps get around the stitches as you work) it would have gone even faster!

Finished card book, spine-view Finished card book, view from the outside in

Now that was a fun, quick project if ever there was one!

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Oh, and I’ve got a giveaway going-on over at Nibbles ‘n Bites; all it takes is a comment to enter!

Bound

64 Arts

I find it incredibly synchronistic that the next art is what it is:

31: Bookbinding

For those who don’t know, I’m trying to wrap up the 2+ year project that is my comic book cookbook for gamers: What to Feed Your Raiding Party. Unfortunately I’m not quite to the binding stage of things, so today’s post is going to be brief so that I can get back to getting there.

As of this weekend I’d laid out the first 119 pages. That sounds like a lot, right? It is, but I think we’re going to hit or pass 250 because I’m barely through the recipes of Chapter 2 (of 5), so there’s still a ways to go.

On the subject of binding, though, I’ve always known how ‘Raiding Party would be bound and it has to do with the greater part of user experience.

Know what I hate? Having to prop open a cookbook to cook from it. Large, hard-cover books will usually stay open, at least after a few uses, but for soft-cover perfect bound books you pretty much have to break the spine (and risk pages falling out) to get it to stay open. Thing is, those soft-cover books are relatively inexpensive to produce (compared to hard-cover) and while still looking fairly professional.

I guess that’s why CreateSpace (the self-publishing arm of Amazon.com) only does soft-cover, perfect bound books.

You know those Jr League and church fundraiser cookbooks? Say what you will for their “professionalism” or lack thereof but they open flat and stay that way while I’m cooking.

Which is why the first printing of What to Feed Your Raiding Party will feature that same sort of comb binding to enable the book to lay flat without a spine to crack or pages to weight down. After that, once I’ve moved on to print-on-demand fulfillment, I’ll be going with Lulu.com because they offer a spiral-binding option that is still surprisingly affordable.

True, my books won’t be as easily available through Amazon as if I went with CreateSpace, but the user experience goes far beyond the sale.

Have you ever thought about the books you read and use and how they’re made? Are there any changes you would make to your favorite books to make them more user-friendly?

Riddle Me This!

64 Arts

30: Riddles

Utilizing formulas in which the sound and meaning of the words are uncertain.

Back a couple of arts ago we did Conundrums, which we defined as short riddles with a pun-based answer. So what’s a riddle? A riddle is a cryptic set of clues, sometimes in rhyme, sometimes not, that describe the answer in a multitude of ways. There’s a lot of metaphor and simile in a riddle, and a lot of thinking outside the box.

I’m not terribly good at riddles.

That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy them, I do, just when someone else is solving them 🙂

I was reading Emma not too long ago and they spend an awful lot of pages on Harriet’s project of constructing a book of riddles. Apparently taking on such projects was a bit of a thing in the Regency era, something nice young ladies did to keep themselves occupied and to expand their mind.

Of course there was ample opportunity for schemes (Austen liked that word for any sort of plan, good or ill-intended, which leads me to believe it’s only in modern times that scheming has become purely negative) in a pursuit like this, since to collect riddles to expand on the ones everyone already knew, you had to ask people to contribute to them. The girls naturally got one from Mr Elton, the local clergyman, and, of course, it was taken the wrong way.

Scratch that, it was taken the right way, but for the wrong girl.

The riddle in question?

My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,
Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease.
Another view of man, my second brings,
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
But ah! united, what reverse we have!
Man’s boasted power and freedom, all are flown;
Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave,
And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.
Thy ready wit the word will soon supply,
May its approval beam in that soft eye!

The answer, a compound word of court (the spectacle of kings) plus ship (monarch of the seas), hinted towards marriage. Too bad the girl he was wooing wasn’t looking for affection.

Another famous riddle is the Riddle of the Sphinx, which the legendary hero Oedipus solved to remove the scourge from Thebes (Sphinxes were not limited to Egypt).

What goes on four legs in the morning,
on two legs at noon,
and on three legs in the evening?

The answer to the much simpler riddle is “a man”. In the morning (the early part of one’s life) he crawls, in the middle he walks upright, and in the later years (golden twilight anyone?) he’s granted a third “leg” via a cane or walking stick.

Of course, today’s title was inspired by the Riddler from the Batman television show. Maybe it was the context of the riddles (or maybe the show just led you down the right path), but those seemed a lot more obvious than the classical riddles mentioned above.

Maybe I should just stick to kids riddles. You know this one, right?

What’s black and white and red all over?

Leave your answer in the comments!

To Quote, or Not to Quote–IS There a Question?

64 Arts

We move on from conundrums and onto quotations–lots of talkie bits in this section of the Arts–more specifically:

29 The art of completing a quotation (pratimala)

This reminds me of an early episode of Charmed where, to cover a generational gap, one character says to another something that leads into a back-and-forth recitation of a bit of Shakespeare (after some search I found it to be from As You Like It, Act III, Scene 2).

The speech in question starts at 1:39. (Direct link for the feedreaders) I watch too much television.

The point is, two strangers found a common ground through a shared knowledge and appreciation of literature.

These days, unless you spend a lot of time around academia, quoting Shakespeare or other arcane information might not get you very far. But fear not! There are plenty of contemporary sources of quotes in movies, songs, books and, yes, television shows.

And sometimes it doesn’t even take a full quote. I was at a party at a sci-fi convention and mentioned Otter Pops (the mystery drink of the evening was reminding me of it). All of a sudden this big, tall dude that I think they called Ogre bellowed “who said Otter Pops? Otter Pops were awesome” or something like that and high-fived me.

Just yesterday I saw two articles that take the idea of of quotations from our ancient lists of arts into the 21st century, to a blogger-specific level.

Why do quotes work as touchstones? Because we recognize them. We’re not trying to pass if off as our own, just a shared affinity for the material. It comes down to respect.

When we respect the source material, we’re proud to say where it came from. Why should our blogs and websites be any different?

  1. If you want to share something, share it in a way people will know how to find more of it.
  2. If you want to use something of someone else’s, ask permission.
  3. If you don’t want to be bothered, create something yourself.

I think it’s pretty simple, yes?

Do you have a favorite quote? Leave it (and where it’s from!) in the comments.