Aquaponics

So today must just be a post-y day for me with this blog. And while this post does not really have anything to do with self-publication or the parameters of the self-publishing class, it does have a bit to do with self-efficiency and the DIY mentality. Plus I'm just super excited about it.

I received my Farm in a Box from Atlanta-based Earth Solutions a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, one of the fittings was incorrect, but I finally got that in on Friday and got my aquaponics system up and running. Aquaponics is a combination of hydroponic plant cultivation and aquatic (obviously) fish cultivation. It becomes a self-contained ecosystem. The fish waste feeds the bacteria whose waste provide the plants with their nutrients who in turn cleanse the water for the fish to go on living. And, since it's self-contained, the entire system uses about 90% less water than soil gardening.
It's actually pretty simple to make on your own. All you need is a couple of fish tanks, some gravel, a pump, and a timer. The one I ordered, however, is made entirely of environmentally friendly rubber (to line the tanks) and sustainably harvested birch. Plus, even with shipping, it cost less (and was less of a headache) than purchasing all of the components individually and building it.
But that's simply because I enjoy the aesthetic. You could build one for much much less if you just cut a plastic barrel in half (which they actually suggest on their website just to get more people doing this).

The yield on the plants is three to six times the yield of soil gardening per square foot! And you can plant them closer together since the root systems are not fighting for nutrients in the soil. I'm waiting on an eco-friendly, low wattage, low heat indoor grow light to arrive in the next few days which means I can have fresh, super local veggies all year long!

I've currently got organic Thai Basil and Rosemary in the system. I'm sprouting seeds for Spinach (which I took from my porch garden), Large Leaf Italian Basil, Blackseeded Simpson Looseleaf Lettuce, Lavender, Sweet Banana Peppers, Congo Trinidad Hot Peppers, and actual Tea bushes now which will eventually make their way into the system.

We're letting the tank cultivate bacteria for a few days, but will be adding goldfish on Thursday. (I switched to the plural here because the fish are totally James' thing.) We have a 20 gallon tank or the fish for our system. Larger systems (Earth Solutions sells them up to 200 gallon tanks with a thirty-five square foot planting deck!) can be used for raising and breeding talapia, bass, or other edible fish for the meat eaters, or koi ponds for folks like myself to don't enjoy eating things with faces. Even scaly ones.

At any rate, I was/am incredibly excited for the system and wanted to share my excitement.

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Comments for the others...

So, I don't know if it's my computer or my browser or what, but apparently, I can not post a comment to anyone's blog if the comment box is embedded in the page. Pop-up comment boxes are fine. And Ian's blog, though embedded, is not a blogger blog, so it worked just dandy as well.

At any rate, here are the comments to the other articles. Actually, to the vast majority of the articles.

Anndell:
Such a thoughtful and well-written article. I love how you opened with a simple anecdote about you and your mom before moving into a piece about a mother/daughter team. And the article itself is so well researched and presented. I feel like I know all there is to know about The Joy of Cooking.
But what’s more is that I feel like I learned several valuable, practical lessons. I feel better prepared to fight for my rights as a self-published author. I feel better versed in trends within layout. I feel more at ease with the potential of dealing with an editor.
It is a really beautiful piece and so informative on so many levels.

Jack:
Your article is both extremely hilarious and extremely informative. I can tell a great deal of research went into it, and I admire that you were able to keep the humor of your illustration within your text.
There are a few areas you could improve on within the text, (ie repetition of words or phrases) but those are merely formal observations and have nothing to do with the information presented or the research conducted (which is obviously well-informed and extensive, respectively).

There is a website (Cracked.com) which dedicates itself to articles about topics such as this alongside general absurdities of our modern world. They are always accepting contributors, and you can be as mouthy/profane as you'd like.
If producing text in this manner has been enjoyable for you, I'd suggest you stick with it and give writing for them a shot.

Karissa:
I am so excited to read these books! Your article informed me of such an intriguing and wonderful collection of thinkers that I previously had no idea existed. I mean, I’m almost certain I’d heard “semiotext(e)” somewhere before (okay, maybe I hadn’t heard the parentheses) but had just let it slip past.
Your article not only made me feel informed about their means of self-publication, it also made me excited to seek them out and really become involved in them. THAT is the sign of a well-written, well-presented article!

Kellyn:
Your voice in this article lends itself so completely to the content that the two together seem destined and impenetrable. I really love the inclusion of the reader in the "we" of the teller. It's a beautiful way of granting a point of entry and drawing them alongside you for your discovery. I also greatly enjoy how the article builds up to the history of the artist book. Most pieces like this would present the history immediately. that's just how our minds supposedly work. In a linear manner.
Here though, you've really captured how our minds actually work. Via questions. We question first. Extensively. We consider all sides. We beat it, and stab it, and fill it with so many holes we're unsure of where to go next. And THEN we research the history.
That works beautifully for this piece.

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Howling at the Moon - a proposal

Once upon a time, fairytales were –quite literally- the stuff of legend. They were the stories of the gods and the mortals, hovering about that limenal space between the two, and nearly always verging on the terrible. And they were fascinating, at least to me.
Then, somewhere along the line, the magic fell out of them. The children escaped the oven; the wolf spit out the grandmother whole; and Disney got so concerned with their “G” rating that they all lived happily ever after.
Yet it is still these tales that stick with us, that tell us to avoid the woods alone after dark or to open our eyes if the President is parading around in the buff. These tales are quite often the impetus to every story ever told, in some form or another. In thinking through this, I really began to embrace the idea of retelling these tales. I considered what it was about them that made me so enamored with their narratives, where it was that that moment of magic really occurred. Thus I began to produce work dealing with these themes.
“Abbaiare All Luna” –Howl at the Moon- “in Dm for Flute” takes a less traditional approach to the telling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but still turns it a bit on its heels. The story, borrowing a bit in style from traditional fairytale narrative but succinctly set within the “modern,” follows a young David Sheridan through his childhood and well into adulthood as his knack for canines and fluid fluting produce a peculiar turn of events for the young chap. Without becoming too heavy-handed, one could even conclude that the piper of the piece welcomes back the snakes and rats while forsaking the children once more.
The story has previously been published as an addendum to Roast, but I really feel it deserves its own binding and a very particular layout that the previous collection of short stories could not offer.

For this presentation of “Abbaiare,” existing in a limited run of twenty-five books, the story would unfold in such a manner as to be reminiscent of the illustrated editions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Little Golden Books most Americans can recall from their childhood. I feel the combination of these styles speaks to the theme and approach of the text itself: verging on the sweetly saccharine renditions of “Little Engines” and puppies who fancy themselves pokey with a wallop of the terrible fury present within the olden texts of lore. With full-color covers presented alternately on green, blue, and cream colored cardstock and black and white internal text featuring silhouetted figures that cater to the tale, “Abbaiare All Luna in Dm for Flute” will weigh in at twenty pages sized 5x7”. Gold drafters tape will line the spine of the book, reinforcing the cover and hiding the binding.

The internal pages of the book will be created with Adobe InDesign while the exterior front and back covers will be created with Adobe Photoshop. The twenty-five books will be produced via a photocopier with binding done by hand.
The internal text layout has already been completed. Lime Glory Caps, a font with a gentle flourish, is used to accentuate the opening paragraph of each page, with Modern No. 20 used as the main body text. This provides a glimpse of the vintage fairytale in conjunction with a modern font that is easy-to-read.

As the project needs to reach its culmination by Friday, the work is already underway. As I am not blessed with a hand for drawing, the images used have been collected from free-use and copyright free sources, and will be further tweaked through Photoshop before entering the document. This will be completed by Tuesday evening.
Enough binding supplies for fifteen copies have been previously purchased. I will buy the remaining supplies needed (ten pages of cover cardstock) Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday night I will utilize the 24-hour Kinkos a few blocks from my house to print the first test of the internal text. If all goes well, this will enable me to produce the copies necessary in a matter of minutes. If there are issues, I will have Wednesday morning to produce the necessary changes before returning to print again on Wednesday night. As the pages will be printed on 8.5x11 paper, I will be able to use the guillotine cutter on-hand at the shop to trim the half inch from each side. This will give the pages the appearance of “full-bleed” and position them slightly smaller than my covers. It will also save me time post-binding, as I will only need to do a limited amount of cutting with a hand-held blade to ensure straight pages.
Thursday will be dedicated to finishing the binding on each book and applying the gold tape to the spine.
Friday, the book will be ready for presentation.

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Market, Yourself

Has this ever happened to you?

You've completed your masterpiece. Carefully bound the pages. Suffered papercuts and Hello Kitty bandages courtesy of your local Kinkos. Made sure your shipped a copy off to your Mom/Dad/Significant Other (or several copies if you are not from the south). And then sat back and watched with an ever-fading bliss as your hard work begins to collect dust.

Well, no more!

I've compiled a resource documenting some of the best marketing practices for DIY publishers, drawing from my own *inexpensive* experiences and scouring the web for other *cough*inexpensive*cough* options. Oh, and did I mention several of the options are really inexpensive or include tips on how to keep them from becoming too much of a burden on your wallet.
Afterall, the goal is to make a little, right? Not throw it all to the wind.

Heck, even the article is FREE.

You can download it right here in High Res for you print-happy folks (still only 3MB) or low-res if you're still having Internet fun with dial up (at 560KB).

Market, Yourself (High Res)

Market, Yourself (Low Res)

Enjoy!

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My novel is now in bookstores

Well, sort of. It's in online bookstores at any rate!

Hymn has found its way to Amazon and Barnes and Noble! Hells yeah!

I've also created a Facebook page for it as a means of trying to get the word out.

Become a fan on Facebook. Order it from B&N or Amazon. Tell your friends to do the same!

Excerpts from the novel are available at the web page for Hymn and on the Facebook page. Help spread the word!

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Shelta

For this limited edition (only 5 made!) short story, I wanted to produce a printed document that had the look and feel of something both sacred and mundane, cared for and discarded.

Utilizing fabric, tin-styled ceiling tiles, and a hand stitched binding, "Shelta" looks as if it could be a journal - which correlates to the writing within the piece itself - manufactured to be hidden amongst the remnants of the family involved.


The pages within the piece unfold to present a map of Ireland, documenting the journey of the family of thieves and con-men presented within the piece.
The work itself is full of secrets; from select words utilized from the dialect ("Shelta") used by the Travelers to communicate without letting their marks know of their plan, to the hard-but-not-impossible to decipher handwriting font used within the piece.

A glossary of terms is provided to allow the reader a limited understanding of the Shelta language. However, the mysteries of the text remain to be unfolded and studied time and time again.

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Play it again, Sam

I had some spare time this weekend between work and obsessively checking Facebook status updates to procrastinate from working on my novel even more by creating another Lulu book. I had been wanting to check out the new minibooks they have been advertising like mad, and I haven't personally done any full-color printing through them. So it is definitely a bit of an experiment for me.

I used a short short story I wrote last winter or maybe early spring. If you read the Creative Writing Guild's publication, it was in the Origins issue. The story itself rests in a bit of a convoluted and slightly insane (perhaps?) space, so the imagery throughout (all copyright free old images found around the 'net) is a bit disjointed in turn. And who knows how it'll look after Lulu's printers get done with it.

One of the issues with Lulu's minibooks, right off the bat, is that you have no choice but to go through their little Photobook Creation Wizard. If by "wizard" they mean "program designed to frustrate and slow you down" they are correct. That is the only magic of this "feature." No Daniel Radcliffe or Selena Gomez in sight.
The back cover is set for you. A solid black field with a bright white Lulu logo. (All the other book choices allow you to remove the Lulu logo.) Then you move through each page, uploading images and doing the plug-and-play thing. There are a lot of "options" as far as page layout. Your picture can be centered with a border (either white or themed), full-page (which I did), two to a page, or half page with text on the other side. There's a strange greyish border around the edges, which I would assume to be crop marks, but they're wider on some sides than others and the gutter seems to be on the outside of the page versus the inside if it's following traditional page numbering. Which I hope it is. Because nothing tells you otherwise and it shows page 2 and 3 (for instance) as splash pages. I'm waiting to see the print version to find out what that is all about.
The other fun thing about Lulu's Wizard is the complete randomness of the program. If you have 5 images and they're all the same size and resolution, after you upload them and place them into the field, each one is going to be a different size and page orientation. There's no telling what causes this. Pics get cut off. They get reoriented. It's bizarre. And their nifty, in wizard editing options don't help a bit. You can "drag to reposition" but only so much and kind of only in an up and down motion. You can make the image larger, but never smaller. You can flip it or rotate it, which does help on occasion, but also changes the size and therefore hwo the image fits on the page. Who knows the logic behind this. I like to think that Lulu is secretly out to destroy the image distributing gene in all 15 year olds (which the onsite ads for the minibooks with their "share your Facebook pics" are definitely geared toward). Either that or they're hoping a stint with a brain teaser that incorporates webcam and cell phone photos of them and their friends will actually increase their problem solving skills and thus create a more tech savvy and adaptable generation whatever-the-fuck-they-are. I think we ran out of letters a while ago. I could be wrong though. About the generational label. I'm pretty sure I'm right about Lulu's intentions.

At any rate, I finished the book and ordered my copies. (Minibooks come in sets of 3 automatically which really makes the idea of "selling" such a work asinine as who in the general public would want to purchase three at a time?) They're postcard size which makes them easily distributable and carry-around-able. And three full-color, perfect bound, 22 page books were only $19. We'll see how they turn out.

In the meantime, here is a link to the thing on Lulu. Apparently, I can't set the photobook to be a download. (I did set the "preview" to be the entire book though.) And they completely lied on the "you can change this later" thing with the title. It won't let me. It just stays "My Photobook" to complete that "am I fifteen on Facebook or fifty and scrapbooking" feel.

So here's to trying new things.


Oh, and also: the new edition of Roast shipped today so I should have it soon. And my copies of Hymn are scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Exciting, exciting!

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