Saturday, September 02, 2006

le parcours et quelques réflexions

Annika's in a serious, somber mood.

The Pooper has another awesome post, this time regarding videotaped beat-downs in Korea, usually involving unfortunate bus drivers.

Nathan's written an excellent piece about Euripides' Medea and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

Along with a recommendation for a French resto, Mike the Metropolitician has an already-much-linked post up regarding problems with the Korean educational system. I'll join the chorus of people who believe this piece needs to be translated into Korean and widely disseminated.

My buddy Mike has published a three-part series titled "It's Good to Be the King" about modern world leaders who, he believes, currently sit in the catbird's seat. Part One is here; Part Two is here; Part Three is here.

While I continue to wrestle with my manuscript (and now with Adobe Acrobat, which I haven't quite figured out how to bend to my will*), I've been thinking about some future writing projects. The quality of CafePress books, if my sample is any indication, is quite good-- light years ahead of Lulu. So I'm thinking about what other sorts of books I might stick on CP. Here's a tentative list.

1. Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms. The book continues to sell at a trickle on Amazon.com, but I see so little cash from this that it's a joke. CafePress, on the other hand, has proved to be a much better venue for selling products, despite my laziness in marketing. Moving the book over to CafePress strikes me as sensible.

2. A second book of humor, this time a compilation from blogged writings. No title as of yet.

3. My children's book, The Sanshin's Tiger, which hasn't gone beyond chapter one (and that chapter's likely to get a major overhaul).

4. A small chapbook about Konglish and other Korean errors, based primarily on a huge pile of notes I took while working my previous job at EC. I quite deliberately took all those notebooks with me in the knowledge that they'd be useful someday.

5. A scaled-down version of the book I'm working on, Water from a Skull, that includes only the essentials. It might, in fact, be unimaginatively titled The Essential Water from a Skull, or Water from a Skull: The Essentials.

Moron this later.





*The question is how to make paper dimensions match page dimensions. In both MS Word and Adobe Acrobat, adjusting page dimensions is a snap. Custom-sizing paper dimensions-- the dimensions of the actual, physical paper onto which a PDF will be printed-- isn't quite so obvious. CafePress has a section with instructions for PC owners on how to deal with this issue, but nothing for us Mac owners. Check it out here.


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