Making a Book

This will not be a post about creating a lovely handmade gift with some decorative Japanese Stab binding and confetti rice paper. Not that I have a problem with hand made books or Japanese Stab binding (though I do find double-fan adhesive binding politically offensive) , I took a class called Artist's Book and Paper Making at Notre Dame lots of years ago and am actually much happier to have taken it now than I was at the time.

No, this post is about a project that one of my professors sprung on our fiction class this Saturday.

His idea is that since we are all ultimately working on having books published (or else what are we doing in an MFA program? Honestly?) We should start to put together a "book" from what we have so far. This entails getting a binder, arranging everything to it's best advantage (kind of a non-issue for me since I'm working on a novel), putting in title pages and acknowledgments, a table of contents, an about the author.Now this sounds a bit elementary school at first, but the more I think about it the more I'm getting into it. Dawson, one of my classmates, pointed out that it's both exciting and helpful to see your work in a form resembling a book, even if it is just a 3 ring binder. That also makes it easier to visualize as a book, in a bookstore, with someone, maybe even a few people(!) wanting to possibly read it! Hey, we all need a little extra motivation sometimes. In my case I'm also hoping to create some cover art for the book, not just to give it an authentic feel but because I've been playing around with some cover ideas and this will force me to sit down and actually craft some initial attempts.

So if my "Drawing of the Day"s this week are all thesis obsessed and with no explanation provided (don't want to spoil the story) please bear with me (all two of you that read my blog). I'm making a book.