Monday 07/05/2021
You know, I think I have been inconsistent with the dates at the head of these entries. Sometimes I use the U.S. convention of mm/dd/yyyy but I notice that at least yesterday I reversed the day and month. No, yesterday was not April 7th.
Today I spent some time preparing the Kindle Vella entry for Pelajis.
In particular they want a piece of art to show at the head of the story. The artwork is to be a square so big, no bigger, and designed so the important bits are in the middle because they will crop it to a circle. After much thinking and looking at, oh, at least 1000 images in google image search, I finally decided to go with a moment early in the story where the kids are looking out of a shuttle window down at Pelajis from space. With that concept in mind it only took an hour or so to cobble up this, from various sources.
At first the Vella web page refused to upload this image. “Something is wrong!” it would say excitedly, “check that your image is the right type and not too large.” Well it was, and it wasn’t; but what was wrong was that it was not exactly square. It was 1266 pixels wide by 1267 pixels high. When I cropped that one row of pixels off the top all was well.
Later I created the first five “episodes” by copying and pasting. It turns out there’s a minimum of 600 words per episode. My first break was a little short. So I had to steal a bit from the next scene, and then from the next, and finally when I got to Episode 5 I was almost 200 words short and at a very definite chapter break. I did not want to pull the top of the next chapter into Ep. 5, so I had to compose 200 words of new story, padding out a scene that I had summarized in a paragraph in the original.
Then I went down to FOPAL and processed a bunch of books, and spent not quite an hour inventorying the books I had thought would be suitable for the Vintage Computer Fest (henceforth VCF). Disappointed to find I’ve got only about 3 boxes, which is not enough to make a good display on an 8-foot table. More on this tomorrow.
Codgerville 