In the Cards

It's been a busy week for me. Earning a living-wise that is. Except earning a living has been boring me. I've had lots to do but the mundaneness of it all is annoying. I usually find boredom irritating. So today I went back to work on my "Tourmaline Mystique" project. That's the name I came up with for my fortune telling system based on a series of forty eight cards I thought up. I've been working on it for quite a few years now but haven't picked it up for the last year or so. Sometimes these things take a while.

I'm at the point know where I have to really test it out and refine what all the cards mean as they interact. Y'know, work on their bullshit capabilities. Since I have no editor on this project (like every project I do; I'm only one person) I needed a little time between when I last worked on them and when I have to think about finalizing them. That's what my next task is: think about how to finish the book that goes with the cards and explains what they do.

The design and illustration of the cards themselves are finished. That took me a couple of years but is completely finalized. The instruction book is far from done. Design and writing-wise. I have plenty of words to go in the book but not the finished words. The first draft is there but that's it. Plus I want to add some more stories to it. That will take some doing.

I did rework the layout of the book so I can print it out easier and make a mock-up to edit. That's a step that takes some doing. I made a mock-up when I last worked on it but it proved less than effective. I made the old mock up from a spiral bound sketch book. I printed out my text and used photo corners to mount it on the left side of the page while mounting the card illustrations on the right. I figured that with photo corners I could easily pull pages out and remount new ones as I made editorial changes. It didn't work out that way.

The book I made overstuffed the spiral sketchbook because of the thickness of all those mounted pages and it never closed right. That also made it hard to handle and turn the pages. Plus my mounted pages often wouldn't stay mounted. The paper I used to print on was too thin for the photo corners and slipped out of them. I was always stuffing the printouts back into the book. This made things too difficult so I put the book down and didn't go back to it. No editing got done.

So now it's time for another try at making a mock-up of the book. I'm taking a different approach this time. I'll print on both sides of the paper and fold and staple the thing together. No, I haven't got the whole thing figured out yet but I'm on it. I wish I had some double sided ink jet coated paper. I have some double sided matte heavyweight inkjet paper but that is too heavy weight. I don't think they make double sided thin inkjet paper. I might just have to go with plain paper. The illustrations might not look so good but the text is what I need to edit. I want to edit on paper because I'm tired of looking at the screen.

Flash forward in time! Whew, yes I just finished up printing out the book I mentioned above. I made it all fit onto twelve sheets of plain paper. Each of the forty eight cards take up half of an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of letter size paper. The paper is turned horizontally so it is actually 11 x 8.5 inches. I had to make a little mock-up to figure out where to put the pages in the layout. Since I was printing on both sides of the paper I would get four cards (pages) per sheet. Page forty eight has to go on the left side of the first sheet and page one on the right. That's so when the paper is folded the pages line up in order. Hence my need for a little mock up otherwise I would never know that page thirty eight goes next to page eleven. It's a tricky little thing that I haven't done in a while.

So here's to hoping I finally get a bit more editing done on this sucker and can learn to tell the future. I'll know it all then!