High Impact

Sure, the endless fields of craters are a clue, but it’s impressive nevertheless to read what a regular pounding the Moon is taking up there. It’s more impressive still to read that if you’ve got the right telescope, the pounding can actually be seen from Earth: in the past two and a half years, NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office (I hope that office has the cool letterhead that it deserves) has visually observed over one hundred meteoroid impact explosions on the lunar surface. Article, map, and a cool little sci-fi-ish video loop are here.

A big part of the dream

The Web 2.0 book promotion blues, distilled:



EDIT: Lest there be any confusion, I am not this clever, at least not often enough to put this thing together. This video is by author Dennis Cass. I haven’t read his book yet but the new cover does look great.

Proof, Part 2

Recently arrived here are the second proofs of Moonshot. Looking them over, I’m like a reformed drinker who just got a whiff of strong whiskey; I want back in. The feeling reminds me of lines which must resonate with anyone who has struggled with a labor of love, specifically with the mixed blessing of finishing it: “God keep me from ever completing anything,” Melville wrote in Moby-Dick. “This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

This is why both bars and publishers have such a thing as last call.

Prêt-à-Porter

Over the years I’ve done much schooling and living in (as Paul Simon sings it) New England, sweet New England. Not until last summer, though, did I make it to Martha’s Vineyard. Once there, one conversation led to another, and I’ve just now finished a small drawing for the Aquinnah Public Library’s summer reading program t-shirts. A cleaner, inked version of this pencil sketch will be used on the shirts, but I still like the pencil and so here it is. The library will be selling the shirts soon, so the only question now is how big of a bite they’ll take out of the island’s omnipresent Black Dog merchandising empire. If the shirts are a hit and the library branches out into tote bags, footwear, housewares, biscotti, and hot sauce, don’t blame me.

Next

The slow shift from one project to the next is getting underway here. Shelves and mental space must be cleared and restocked. As for what’s to come, for the moment I’ll just say that on Friday I was in Queens walking toward the Noguchi Museum to begin researching drawings for a great picture book text by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, and that as I walked the words of Chapman, Cleese, et al., rang in my ears: “And now for something completely different.”

Still, you can always find a point of connection if you know where to look, and on the museum’s gift shop wall I found mine: A George Nelson ball clock, just the sort that you see in the family scenes in Moonshot. I don’t imagine that the Moonshot family paid $315.00 for theirs, but I was still somehow glad for the segue.

None Dare Call It Done. And Yet...

I reliably disappointment friends who ask if I’m happy to be done with a book. The thing is, it’s hard to be happy about being done when you don’t know if you are or not, and I almost never do. There’s no strip of tape to break as you cross the finish line, and usually there’s not even a finish line. For weeks after the final (“final”) art is turned over to the publisher, you, the editor, the art director, the designer, and the copyeditor are still looking for and catching things that might need work. (Whether you catch something or not, just the knowledge that you and others are looking manages to strip a lot of the sheen from the idea of the big finish.) Even weeks later, after the first proofs have come back from the printer, straggling problems may reveal themselves. So it’s good news here that Moonshot has now been through all, or at least most, of that. The proofs are reviewed, tweaked, corrected, patched, and amended, and shortly on their way back to the printer. There are worlds of work left for the publisher, Atheneum, but as far as mine own part is concerned, well, not until I have the bound book in my hands will I call it done, but as they say at NASA: the vehicle is through the region of maximum dynamic pressure!

Proof

Less than a month after the interior artwork was turned in, and the first proofs of Moonshot are here on my desk! Note the First Proof band in which the pages come wrapped. Not so dissimilar from the familiar Sanitized For Your Protection band, but we don’t dwell on that. Anyway, if you don’t know, proofs are what the printer sends to the publisher after the printer has received the original art, but before the book itself is printed. When the publisher receives first proofs, the art directors and designers put them under a good light, give them the eye, and then ask that the printer use less blue here, more contrast there, clean up that spot and that speck, and so on, all through the book. The printer takes these comments and produces—second proofs. This process repeats until everyone’s done all that they can to make the pages look their best. There's a nice old-fashioned sense of craftsmanship to the process, and also a meaningfulness to seeing a publisher working to make your book look the best that it can.

Only after everyone's satisfied (or, sometimes, reasonably satisfied; this is the real world, after all) do the printing presses roll in earnest.