so i am finishd with the text of my book. which should mean i am finishd with the book. but, alas, that is not true. some of the words in this book arent content to stay still, they want to float around, change colors, disappear, fight eachother, etcetera. this means programing.

my friend tom white has volunteerd to help with this. but i am trying to meet tom halfway by learning to program. ive been working thru the exercises at code academy to learn javascript. so far its going realy well [ i love math and logic ] . ive gotten all the exercises right on the first or second try, and rarely had to look at hints. but today i hit a wall. i spent about three hours on step four of challenge 2.2– trying things and getting confused and looking things up online and trying other things that still didnt work. but finaly i got it. here it is–

this isnt all of it– the part that was left off because it wouldnt fit on the console is…

}    return sum;   }

this takes a number and adds the sum of all numbers less than this number which are divisible by 3 or 5, but not both.

last night i was telling andrew how much trouble i was having getting a sunrise into my book. he said, “i know. what hasnt been said already?” i said, “not in words, i mean an actual sunrise.” he said “you mean an illustration?” and i said “sortof.”

[ click here for pdf -- higher quality ]

when i was visiting D & mike in seattle over xmas break, mike had a cool idea, which was to include illustrations of some of the martial arts moves executed in my book. i sortof forgot about it until the other day, when i was editing the part where D uses an armlock to immobilize a-l. it is a simple move, but difficult to describe. but a picture is worth a 1000 words…

kinda nestles right in there, doesnt it? thanks mike!

funny you should ask. today, instead of goin to mark and krysia’s or to the artopening at athica, i stayd home and workd on the titepockets chapter. while i was editing the text, i came across a sign that i had formerly made in Word—

looks prety getto. the underlines are especialy crude. plus they look difrent on macs and pc’s, which can be a problem. so i thought i’d replace it with a real sign. i recently discoverd my printer has a scanner, and ive been making a lot of signs by hand.

easy, right? here are the steps it took, that i remember—and i know i’m forgettin a bunch. then at the end i’ll show you the results.

1. find red sharpie and make a sign.
2. mess up, make it again.
3. try an experiment with scotch tape that doesnt endup workin out.
4. scan the sign 4 times with varius settings and placements.
5. decide none of them are good and scan it two more times.
6. pick the original scan. crop it and and edit it in photoshop.
7. go into Word document and insert sign.
8. decide it sucks. go back and edit it some more in photoshop.
9. put the new sign in.
10. delete the old fake sign that now seems so crude.
11. adjust size and placement of the new sign till it looks right.
12. adjust placement of text after the sign.
13. make sure to punctuate the new sign with a comma.
14. decide the comma should be red to match the sign.
15. decide the comma should look almost like its tumbling off the sign. try italicizing but that doesnt work. try changing typeface to comic sans, that doesnt work. change typeface to georgia, increase point size to 14, and lower it by 1.5 points. that works.
16. decide the sign needs a shadow.
17. try 4 difrent lengths of shadow, 3 difrent transparency levels, and about 6 difrent shadow angles before settling on the right one.
18. realize the sign needs a very light border to outline the other two sides so it wont look like its floating in space. add outline. adjust size and shading.
19. realize youve been looking at the monitor at the wrong angle and the line is much darker than you thought it was. make it lighter.
20. that changes how the shadow looks. redo the shadow.
21. realize that the spacing is off between the sign and the comma—adjust letterspacing before comma.
22. realize the red on the comma is brighter than the red on the sign. darken it.
23. realize the red from the comma is going to bleed into the words that come after it. adjust the color manualy for each individual letter, b-u-t  t-a-y-l-o-r to make it look like its fading from red to black.
24. realize that the red is going to bleed into the other side, too. adjust color for s-a-y-i-n — so it fades into red to mirror the fadeout from the other side.
25. realize that the other side is closer to the red [ because of that pesky comma ] so it should be slightly redder. adjust color for each letter, b-u-t  t-a-y-l-o-r, to make them look redder.
26. realize the paragraph containing the sign has an extraneus word and delete it.
27. this changes the line breaks. move the sign acordingly, move the text after it, and recalibrate the letter spacing before the comma.

this is what it ended up lookin like—

 definatly worth it.

just made a sign for the tip jar at bluesky (the coffee shop in my novel). usualy i use adobe illustrator for stuff like this, but today i decided to go oldskool–

here is a pdf showing the sign incorporated into the text   [ be warned, there is a curse word in here ]

the narrator doesnt know what the sign means, i’m guessing most readers wont. just curius– does anybody know?

When the narrator shows up in athens, strange things begin to happen. one of the things that happens is he accidentally gets a job at a coffee shop. luckily for him, evrything you need to know about working at the shop is on a document calld “THE LIST.” Of course, its a pretty chaotic list. I spent last night making it a little more chaotic, heres the beginning of it–

while i was working on this book, i was also doing a movie adaptation for a screenwriting class. the screenplay format inevitably crept into the book. one thing i learnd from the movies is the importance of the beat— a discreet unit of time in which a single action ocurs or we notice a specific detail. in certain parts of this book that i would call “action sequences,” the text is setup so there is one line for each beat. the beats cascade across the page to give it the feel of “watching it happen.” heres one i’ve been working on today, where all that happens is they drive across a street. but to the caracters, it is a momentous crossing, because they are leaving townieville [ anybody whos ever lived in five points and tried to get a townie to come to your house knows what i’m talkin about ] .

heres what it would look like with traditional formatting—