I will wax poetic here.
It's been one year since I handed over a draft to start my first collaborative writing effort. The end result is ParaEducate, available at Amazon, Amazon.co.uk, and Kindle formats.
And by our first meeting and after 5 hours of work, we had made 50% progress to our first draft. By November, we had a physical first draft. By December we had finished up all major edits and January we had spent most of doing graphics. Feburary was fine tuning, marketing, getting our company established, and on February 29, 2012, we were live just in time as we walked into our first conference.
And now, we've done a total of 2 speaking venues as a company, we've been accepted to the national stage to speak for the first time to a wider audience. Our book has sold the first copies. We've been reviewed as authors.
And I'm preparing several new projects as an author.
I sit back and have to let out a deep breath. It's been like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and we've not even reached the height of where we want to go.
Life will lead if you are unprepared. But I know this, I have never been more honored as an author to have written with Megan, Jenny, and Lisa. I cannot wait until our next project is ready to be shared.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Look Out Long Beach!
Co-authors Jennifer Kurth, Megan Gross, and I will all be speaking at TASH, Long Beach 2012.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Strangely Qualified But This Is Much Harder Than I'm Used To
To be honest, writing work for students with disabilities is a lot harder than one might imagine. Especially with trying to generate content that is original. And then you realize, that Project Alpha is completely about non-fiction works of places I've never been.
So, my readers will be getting realistic looking villages, cathedrals, minerets all drawn by me in whatever illustration program I have at my finger tips. Probably Form Z because I'm that sort of precise. One would imagine my background would pay off here.
But it's the location of the information that is the hard part. I'm 900 miles away from my preferred library with all of this information archived. My hand is proving untrained as I approach black and white drawings.
Of all the things I've done for Project Alpha, this is the one thing I'm the most qualified to do. I've spent years studying ancient architecture, most of my formative years in college were about all the developments to just past the Renaissance in architecture. And architecture at that time was the kingpin in all things cultural, religious, and social. Martin Luther did not tack his 95 theses to a random tree. He tacked them to the church door. Roman aqueducts still are in use in Europe. What is built and what is not built before the era of Exploration is key in the way that we view our world today.
I'm also troubled by the precision that exists of the types of materials I have had in the past. Normally, if I were doing this work at work, I'd Google up some images and paste them into my file and print like mad. There you go. That's it. And I would hope that at least hundreds of the best teachers were doing that at least for their students. But it's time to move away from this time consuming project. Project Alpha wants to stop that part. Not because it's time consuming, but because case managers and teachers have better things to do with their time. And the information has got to be correct because I have met all too many well intentioned staffers being too vague when they need to be specific or making the information up. (This is not to say the time I offered a student two answers to the question, "What was the Gettysburg Address for?" A. President Lincoln to summon the zombies at the Gettysburg field to rise up and fight for the South, B. President Lincoln's attempt to write about the loss of life at Gettysburg and why the North must continue to fight the Civil War and my student chose 'A' because she heard the word "zombie" and that HAD to be the right answer.)
Except right now, I'm drawing a Roman Army. I wonder if the students will notice that they're stick figures because there are a TON of these pesky little soldiers waiting to 'die' for their Emperor.
So Project Alpha has history, science, we're open to discussions of covering specific health topics. We are also working on a lit circle book for students. The first phase of Project Alpha even includes information about Adaptations and Modifications, a How to and why to. Project Alpha will have multiple levels to access the same information. There's a lot of work being done to make this worth while. It currently does look like it may just be more than 3 books worth of material here.
But I've got to get back to my illustrations. Maybe I'll take a break from Rome and work on some armor for knights or work on the towers of an Western African Mosque.
So, my readers will be getting realistic looking villages, cathedrals, minerets all drawn by me in whatever illustration program I have at my finger tips. Probably Form Z because I'm that sort of precise. One would imagine my background would pay off here.
But it's the location of the information that is the hard part. I'm 900 miles away from my preferred library with all of this information archived. My hand is proving untrained as I approach black and white drawings.
Of all the things I've done for Project Alpha, this is the one thing I'm the most qualified to do. I've spent years studying ancient architecture, most of my formative years in college were about all the developments to just past the Renaissance in architecture. And architecture at that time was the kingpin in all things cultural, religious, and social. Martin Luther did not tack his 95 theses to a random tree. He tacked them to the church door. Roman aqueducts still are in use in Europe. What is built and what is not built before the era of Exploration is key in the way that we view our world today.
I'm also troubled by the precision that exists of the types of materials I have had in the past. Normally, if I were doing this work at work, I'd Google up some images and paste them into my file and print like mad. There you go. That's it. And I would hope that at least hundreds of the best teachers were doing that at least for their students. But it's time to move away from this time consuming project. Project Alpha wants to stop that part. Not because it's time consuming, but because case managers and teachers have better things to do with their time. And the information has got to be correct because I have met all too many well intentioned staffers being too vague when they need to be specific or making the information up. (This is not to say the time I offered a student two answers to the question, "What was the Gettysburg Address for?" A. President Lincoln to summon the zombies at the Gettysburg field to rise up and fight for the South, B. President Lincoln's attempt to write about the loss of life at Gettysburg and why the North must continue to fight the Civil War and my student chose 'A' because she heard the word "zombie" and that HAD to be the right answer.)
Except right now, I'm drawing a Roman Army. I wonder if the students will notice that they're stick figures because there are a TON of these pesky little soldiers waiting to 'die' for their Emperor.
So Project Alpha has history, science, we're open to discussions of covering specific health topics. We are also working on a lit circle book for students. The first phase of Project Alpha even includes information about Adaptations and Modifications, a How to and why to. Project Alpha will have multiple levels to access the same information. There's a lot of work being done to make this worth while. It currently does look like it may just be more than 3 books worth of material here.
But I've got to get back to my illustrations. Maybe I'll take a break from Rome and work on some armor for knights or work on the towers of an Western African Mosque.
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