So today I went to see the friendly copy shop people, and they told me that it would be easy for them to make a booklet for me. I wouldn’t even have to do the layout or printing myself, I could just bring in a file and they would print that file for me, arranging all the booklet features. (Like, you know, how all the pagination works, and all that.) And we went through all the costs, for paper, printing, binding, folding, cropping if necessary, etc.

And so I came home and started to make another booklet, formatted differently this time. I took a poem I had written a long, long time ago, a poem called “Maid Maureen.” It’s a sort of parody of an old ballad, and it’s about how the West Wind falls in love with Maid Maureen, trapped in her tower. I used a John William Waterhouse painting that I believe is called Boreas for the cover image.  Here’s what the cover looks like, but you can’t quite tell the size because it doesn’t have a border. That’s because I learned how to save the document as a PDF, then open it in Photoshop and save it as a JPG. Rather than copying and pasting, which is what I did last time. I think I’m getting pretty good at this.

And here are two pages:

I’m really rather proud of myself. You see, my brother is Myk Melez of Mozilla (google him, he gets more hits than I do). He’s, like, a computer whisperer. And I really don’t have an intuitive sense for technology, at all. But I like to know how to do things like create websites and publish small books myself, because those are the sorts of skills that come in handy when you’re a writer.

I don’t know, maybe I’ll actually make “Maid Maureen” into a booklet and then do – what with it? Let me know if you have any ideas.

And here, in case you’re interested, is Boreas, which I think is a gorgeous painting: