SoFoBoMo: Editing phase

I'm back from a few days in Atlanta, where I took the last of my photos for my SoFoBoMo book. Still need to go through and select out the 35+ best ones for the book, but once I've weeded out the bad ones, I have decided on my further selection criteria: No theme whatsoever, simply a look at the breadth of (sometimes extraordinary) experiences I have in an ordinary month. I'm going to go for variety as much as possible.

I shot all the photos over a period of 30 calendar days, though I actually only shot on 14 of those days (March 29-30, April 1-3, 5, 6, 13, 20, 21, 24-27). So I am allowing my “fuzzy month” to spill over into the first couple of weeks of May for the editing and layout work. I decided to do the layout in Microsoft Word, since I know it intimately, and it was taking too long to get proficient in InDesign. I will do the front and back covers in InDesign. I've already done a layout for that. All I need to do is plug in the photo I choose for my front cover.

I've also picked a title for the book, written all the introductory material, and thrown together a first crack at the book with one page of text and one photo, just to give myself some momentum. I converted the cover from InDesign to PDF and the content from Word to PDF and combined the two PDF documents into one. All this in about 5 hours this evening. It looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. I've signed up for an Issuu account so I can publish it there once I'm done. Yippee! This is getting exciting.