All Done In…

So I started at about 5:30 this morning. It’s 7:30 p.m. and I’m knocking off. That’s…what? Fourteen hours, interruptus…

Paused to walk the dogs (40 minutes), clean the pool (half an hour), and dicker with an Apple tech to get my email back online (probably another 20 or 30 minutes, not counting time spent steaming at Apple’s obnoxious telephone Muzak). So about an even 12-hour workday. Nice.

I’ve created not one, not two, not three, but eight renditions for Honored Client’s book cover. Excessive, I know. But…though I’ve now generated about 30 book covers for my own fine literature, this is the first cover art I’ve ever done for someone else. And I really would like it to be right. I really, really want him to be happy with it.

We’ll see.

Two of the covers are pretty good. The problem is, we’re working with images he took himself during a lifetime of world travel. He has some wonderful pictures documenting some wonderful adventures, but the quality of the images leaves something to be desired. Even the best of those old point-and-shoot cameras left something to be desired…like resolution, for one.

Later in his travels, he got his hands on a high-quality digital camera, and those images are close to print-quality. But from among those, I’ve only got one candidate for cover art.

One picture is extremely cool: it’s a Gypsy family, presumably in Romania, riding atop a haystack on a horse-drawn wagon. The people in the image are mostly kids. It’s really a kick. But when you take one of these things and blow it up to fit a 5.5 x 8.5-inch cover — or worse, try to wrap it around front to back to get fancy with the thing — it pixelates. Big time.

Tried sharpening it with one of those online photo editors. When set site-by-side with the original, it doesn’t seem any better. Or any worse. The same…that would be the word we’re groping for here.

In terms of print quality, the best picture he has — also extremely cool — is of a man playing a traditional Ukrainian stringed instrument called a bandura.

The guy’s performing on a sidewalk in front of a shop, the door behind him open and the shop window plastered with come-ons and advertisements. The picture is as clear and crisp as you could possibly want. Trouble is, when I set it up to fill the front cover, all those window ads create a mass of visual static. No matter what you try to do with the cover lines, no matter how big you make them, no matter how loud you make them, no matter how white you make them, no matter what kind of shadows or glow or whatever you manipulate, they’re lost. Unreadable.

So  I ended up cropping the thing to create some space above the image for the title and subtitle. The byline could run across the gray stone sidewalk with no problem. It looks…OK. Better than most of the others because it has enough resolution to hold up to some abuse. But not as good as it would’ve looked had I been able to use the entire image to fill the front cover.

We’ll see how that goes over. Tomorrow the client will be here to inspect all these efforts.

Meanwhile, today I also plowed through another chunk of textual analysis of Semiramus narratives ranging from the 1st century AD to the early modern period. If I ever reach the end of this chapter (which just now seems questionable), I’ll be halfway through.

The current Chinese graduate student is quiescent for the nonce, presumably wrestling another chapter of her dissertation into shape. I believe she’s past the deadline for her extension, so I hope her director hasn’t knocked her out with the Nerf bat.

With three large projects on the burner, what should one of the CLS co-editors do but load up a new article for the next issue. Holy sh!t.

Hope to foist that onto the Kid, assuming she’s back from the honeymoon and not completely smothered with the work that will have piled up during that excursion. If she can’t do it, then I’ll have to. How, exactly, escapes me.