My book will become a reality!

    I moved a step closer to getting patterns completed for the book last night, or this morning, it was about 2 a.m. but I had not really been to bed yet, so I am not sure which you would call it. I got a call from Bob, Bob is my wannabe publisher, or at least the agent assigned to sell me as much as possible to “help get my book published. He called to offer me a deal that I could not refuse and to, in his words “light a fire under me” to get the process going. I have decided the best thing for me is to start out self publishing with an on-demand company. I have learned quite a lot about the publishing industry lately. On-demand means you pay them to help you put together a book and they offer it for sale to bookstores; on-line and brick and mortar. Then whenever someone orders a copy they print it and send it. I make money off the sale of those books, if and when they get ordered. Bob’s job is to sell me a package to get the book printed and edited and maybe, for a little bit extra, advertised. He is also there to keep me motivated and actively working on the project.

     So, the progress I was talking about, remember, that is how this all started, I have been searching for months for a program that will allow me to put my crochet designs in a graph format. I finally found a couple of them last night. The first one was for sale for $160.00 and on a disk they would send; the second was available for immediate download for $3.95. Can you guess which one I went with? Bells and whistles are overrated. This program will allow me to write my patterns in word form then to translate them into graphs. This is exciting because more and more patterns coming out right now are offered in both forms. It helps those of us that are very visual, to read patterns more easily. Graphs have a lot of X’s and O’s and squiggly lines all over. These graphs sort of look like a football playbook. Actually, I think I have seen some patterns that would make a pretty good football play when graphed out. Note to self: get a hold of Chilly and let him know about those. Hey they can’t be any worse than some of the plays he called last season!! Maybe I can even design one that Bret can throw and AP can actually catch. Hey I may have a whole new career going here. Football plays disguised as graphed crochet patterns. Ok settle back down to earth and deep breath, whewwwww moving on. So the long and short of it is I am getting to work on my patterns! The book may become a reality. Check that, WILL become a reality. I guess I should not spend any more time procrastinating here I should be working on writing patterns.

Losing your computer cord sucks!

      I was at a wonderful quilt retreat last weekend and got 3 whole projects completed. It was great! I made a MN Wild (that’s hockey) wall hanging for Mike. I also made two bags, one was very easy and one we lovingly referred to as “the bag from hell!!” They both turned out great and I love them. The main problem with the bag from hell was the writing of the pattern. It was so poorly written it both confused and frustrated us to distraction. It took two of us 4 hours to cut out the pieces. Then we spent another 8 hours putting it together. Now that I have done it once, I know what changes to make so it will go together easier.

     Once again I seem to digress; the point of this blog was to tell you I have not posted since my trip because somehow I lost the cord to my computer and it does like to run without power. I ran it completely dry and had to wait till I could get a new cord. The way things work in my world, I am sure because I bought a new cord I will find the old one.