It’s been a busy time; the sort of busy that happens when you decide to make a book of your work, along with all the little pieces of text you’d applied to it. After wrestling with Word and finding nothing stayed in the same place as I changed things along the way, I went to PowerPoint, which makes slides that can be printed as a pdf – ideal for sending to a PoD publisher.

Choosing a publisher was easier than I’d imagined as the one I looked at that had been used recently and to good effect by an O.C.A. fellow traveller, also does black paper and can be published in landscape orientation as a wirebound volume. The one I’ve used before couldn’t do either.

I made a mock-up.

So for the last few aeons, ok a week or so, I’ve been assembling the work and managing the detail of the layout, which includes page numbering, when to use regular numbers and when Roman numerals. Then there’s the alignment. Remembering where you put xi on the page to ensure all the others are the same font and size, and crucially, in the same position.

This helped settle the question of orientation, size, colour, and binding.

PowerPoint can helpfully change all the following enumerations but that only works if you keep your pages in the same position in the book. Curating on the hoof negates that facility so you’re on your own getting all that in order.

But, as of today, everything is where I want it to be, with its titles and details in the index and its image/text positioning in the order advised by most of the people I asked. I have to do this because, as a left-hander, I can’t judge where most people would want their image and it turns out, they want it on the right whereas I’d put them on the left.

All of the images are AR-enabled via Artivive, and in the electronic version there are videos accessible directly from the page.

I have some more work in progress, so the contents page isn’t complete yet, and I’ve recruited an editor*, a published author in her own right whose job will be to read for readability and readiness for publication; and a person whose work is considerably beyond my own but who uses AR, to write a Foreword for it. They both need to see it to feedback or write their piece for inclusion before it’s fully ready for publication.

Publication, from past experience of DIY publishing, is a matter of uploading the manuscript as a pdf then ordering a copy of the book to, hopefully, approve it. Although, also from experience, any number of difficulties might present themselves before that can happen.

In the past, having an actual publisher used to take care of all that but this really only happens now if you’re already well-known as an author, backed by an academic or other institution, or a celebrity talking about cooking six-course meals in the boot of their car somewhere in the Himalayas. The rest of us? Prepare for some grind.

It has no title yet although Frog Fall is a strong contender.

All elements; text, images, concept; are (c)Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2025. AI trawling is prohibited.

*As the book will be submitted as part of my final assessment, I need to establish the role of an editor in this instance. My book contains tracts of text which cheekily replace the so-called tombstones (labels) placed alongside paintings in galleries. Unlike the traditional labels, mine are short stories or prose poetry pieces that draw on the finished piece to which they refer. Some are real-world, some science fiction, some speculative fiction, any of which may appear as conversational dialogue between the unnamed narrator and the reader, a third-person story, or a humorous monologue. No lectures or morality tales, at least not so’s you’d notice.

Here’s one:

Frog Fall

Frogs have fallen from the sky

since at least the first century CE.

Frogs fall from the sky the world

over, even Croydon.

Frogs do not actively seek to fall

from the sky, they are caught up by

storms in one part of the world

and released in another.

Quite what they make of this as

they plummet earthwards is

anyone’s guess because frogs,

after all, are not petunias.

2024

I’m trusting you to know that last line alludes to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.