We’ve already met a ferry. Most of Isle au Haut has national park status as part of Acadia. The boat takes foot-travel passengers, too.
A scene along the way.
Cruise ships on way
Eastport is preparing to welcome eight cruise ships for visits after Labor Day. That’s about half as many as last year’s record but could top it in the number of passengers. Four others were slated to visit but had to change plans when Customs could not provide agents to clear passengers and crews into the United States.
So far, I’ve found seven of the expected ships.
- September 3: Enchanted Princess, 1,083 feet length, 18 decks, 4,500 maximum passengers, 1,346 crew.
- September 17: Roald Amundsen, 459 feet, 530 maximum passengers, 160 crew.
- October 5: Zuiderdam, 936 feet, 1,964 maximum passengers, 817 crew.
- October 13: Volendam, 778 feet, 1,718 maximum passengers, 647 crew.
- October 14: Azamara Journey, 594 feet, 781 maximum passengers, 408 crew.
- October 15: Viking Mars, 748 feet, 938 maximum passengers, 465 crew.
- October 27: Le Champlain, 430 feet, 264 maximum passengers, 112 crew.
- Next year is already shaping up to be more active.
The visits have boosted the local retail season for many merchants, especially after the Summer People have retreated to their usual haunts.
Away she goes, Act 2
Removing the old asphalt roofing and underlying sheathing and replacing them with standing-seam metal roofing promised to be an encore act of last fall’s drive on the back half of the house. A dustpan, or shed, dormer, connecting what had been two small dormers would be the biggest design difference.
This time the work would be in full view on a central pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare. By now, the renovation is a widespread topic of conversation, year-round residents and summer people alike. Yes, one more aspect of small-town living.
Once again, new rafters would replace the old ones, many of them charred in the 1886 downtown fire as well as a later chimney fire or two. And the new 2-by-12s would be more numerous than the old 3-by-4, 4-by-5, and 5-by-6 beams they were replacing. They would also be up to building code rather than sporadically placed. Better yet, they would be solidly joined to a ridge pole and the four central structural support columns our contractor had inserted last fall. Earlier episodes of this series discuss the intricate work of getting those significant details into place.
Once underway, this phase turned into something more than a quick encore. Removing the two dormers had its own complications, and then a series of rainy day forecasts prompted Adam to concentrate on the south end first rather than the full roof in one sweep.
Further complications came in finding the sheathing was doubled, unlike the back, and a desire to salvage as much of the timber as possible. Some folks in this project are hoping to make a dining room table or some such to recognize the home’s heritage.
Our thinking about this project has definitely changed. Adam is really rebuilding the top half of our house, not merely remodeling it. We’re most impressed. Technically, it’s still post-and-beam aka timber framed.
Would I have gone along with all this if I had known about all this at the outset?
We really didn’t have much choice. As we’ve been discovering, there was so much trouble just waiting to happen. Fortuitously, we’re addressing it all proactively rather than in a panic after an overhead disaster.
We’re no longer tempting fate, are we?
Thistle buds
Cony Park, Eastport, Maine
Let’s be clear, you do judge a book by its cover
With my training as an artist, I have some strong feelings about book covers. Most of the ones I see leave me cold. I think they’re too cluttered, and most of them lack a strong graphic element – I prefer a good photograph though am coming around on the painted image argument – and I like a clean, easy to read impression. Some of the typefaces used for the title or the author are nearly impossible to make out.
I did have a friend who was a professional illustrator for a Fortune 500 corporation. CAD (computer assisted design) was overtaking the field, and he felt it was destroying his artist’s hand, the one with the Rhode Island School of Design sharpened skills. His aspiration was to design old-fashioned book jackets, and while his style there wasn’t my cup of tea, I could see its appeal. Fortunately, he conceived a children’s book that took off, in part because it was based on a Pete Seeger song, which did get buyers’ attention. And led to many more all on his own.
I still don’t understand all the nuance, though. Is it true that a certain strand of fantasy is supposed to have a specific element woven into the cover to alert a potential reader that this is the subgenre she’s looking for? You know, maybe a touch of moonlight or a small bat in flight or a golden glimmer in someone’s eye?
I am learning, though. A cover makes a promise with a reader, so I’ve heard at Smashwords.
My thoughts on cover design and some of my favorites appear in earlier posts here at the Red Barn.
Self-publishing requires much more than merely producing a compelling text.
Naming a book is hard enough. For the record, I found naming What’s Left to be my most difficult, as I’ll explain in a future post.
In the world of books, and not just ebooks, a strong cover is crucial.
If you can afford to hire an illustrator or graphic artist to design yours great. I’m envious.
My first novel, in paper, wound up with an “art designer” misfire. Rather than respecting the black-and-white photo of passengers in a subway car, a flat yellow lotus shape was cut into the image with the title and author credits inside that field. It didn’t fly. In addition, my name wasn’t left as simply Jnana, as I desired. It was the full yoga version, an additional five syllables or 14 letters. Well, it kinda has a 1950s feel, even with some graffiti on its walls, but the action was all high hippie ‘60s and early ‘70s. I’m now wondering if getting a tagger to do the cover would have been a more successful alternative. I’m sensing it would have been a more in-your-face result. Buy me now!
For my first round at Smashwords, I hired a book designer who was, I seem to recall, living in the Czech Republic. Emailing made everything easier, including paying him via PayPal, which was new to me. Since he had a deal with a stock agency for low-cost photos, I rifled through its online pages filled with shots that might fit my need.
It’s harder than you’d think.
A good cover isn’t a poster. It’s more like a billboard on a much smaller scale. And your potential readers are zipping by.
The right photo turns out to be a rarity. It has to somehow reflect the story and still attract a buyer.
Even when you find a good fit, there can be problems. For instance, the photo I settled on for Hippie Drum was a black-and-white portrait of a shirtless young male playing a set of Conga drums. It even looked a lot like me at the time of the story. Little did I know how many viewers it repulsed.
There is debate over showing a person’s face on the cover. It can limit a reader’s perception of your central character, for one thing, and one reader’s ideal can be an instant rejection from another.
If you’re going the human face route, you may find the perfect photo with one slight flaw. She’s a redhead while your character’s brunette. It may be easier to tweak the book to fit the cover.
The experience of tweaking a character to fit the cover image.
There’s also a debate over a painted or drawn artwork versus a photograph.
When I got around to designing my own covers, I came upon a drawn image of a single daffodil bloom. How perfect and I still love it. And within the title I inserted a peace emblem for an “O” in DAFFODIL SUNRISE.
A few years later, when I changed the title, that cover went out of circulation. That peace emblem just didn’t work with the new version’s Kindle print-on-demand cover, either.
I have to admit a special fondness to the ones on Subway Visions, Yoga Bootcamp, and the Secret Side of Jaya – none of them photos.
Here it comes
Late afternoon, Cony Park, Eastport, Maine, as the fog rolls in.
Villains add up
It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one, 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it turn their eyes on the republic of Venice.
James Madison in Federalist No. 48
Late afternoon fog rolling into Lubec
The golden hour of late afternoon sunlight adds to the wonder.
Normally, Eastport’s waterfront would be visible from here.
Jed Vance does have a sense of déjà vu all over again
Back in my wildly ambitious youth, shortly after graduating from college, I envisioned writing a genre-bending novel blending politics and science fiction. Well, my degree was in political science and sci fi was one category of literature that had a growing readership.
My premise was space aliens dropping a young male off in an older suburb of Cincinnati, as in Ohio, where he would be groomed to run for president of the United States. With a nod toward what we now classify as AI, he would be perfectly programmed to fit the market surveys. And with another nod toward what is so-inaccurately called “reality television,” he would be given a fictional past and identity.
The working title was The Cowboy from Mars, and this was back in the early ‘70s.
~*~
I hate to admit that getting from there to an acutal campaign narrative required much more development than I was equipped to produce as an aspiring novelist, and a race for the White House could have been its own War and Peace in terms of characters and pages. Should I add that comedy is very hard to write?
Was I wrong to assume the project had potential?
Is what we’re facing today some kind of weird acid trip?
I mean, the man who presumptuously eliminated the periods from his initials for some kind of marketing vanity but grew up not that far south of me in what looks like far more privileged economic conditions now appears weirdly, well, like a silicon boob. I do hope that doesn’t offend anyone but it is the best I can do.
~*~
Looking at the current political situation has me seeing what would have been unimaginable in its absurdities. It really does seem fictional, outrageous, even tragic. It’s enough to make me wonder which candidate came from Mars or beyond.
As for those of you viewing this from outside of the USA? What are you making of it?
From what I’ve seen of the Founding Fathers of my country, I can say that they believed in rational thought. I hate to think they were wrong there.
Maybe that’s why I couldn’t write that novel.
Memories of places in the town I grew up in
I’ve mentioned a few others, such as the art museum, in other posts here. Now, to add a few more, in no particular order. Again, I’m looking at Greater Dayton rather than strictly inside the city limits.
- NCR: The National Cash Register Company’s world headquarters looked more like an open college campus with linden trees and pristine lawns than an industrial jumble behind barbed wire and hurricane fencing. It even had a fine auditorium and pipe organ, used for its gatherings of salesmen but also the concerts of the Civic Music Association – I heard a number of famed musicians there. And I was awarded my Eagle Scout badge and later my high school diploma on its stage. And, oh yes, I can’t overlook Old River, the employee park with the lagoon and boating, a fine miniature golf course, and a huge outdoor swimming pool – when one of my buddies whose father worked at NCR and thus had a pass to the park asked if I wanted to go, there was only one possible answer. Please!
- The corner display windows at Rikes department store: The pioneering retailer was the place to shop in town, and anytime we took the bus, say to the library or a movie, we’d wind up checking the latest display – especially at Christmas. During my senior year, some of my art work was used in the background of the featured fashion.
- The YMCA: I learned to swim at the indoor pool and sometimes applied my allowance to a grilled cheese sandwich later, over on the men’s side. And then, little kid that I was, I enjoyed the freedom of taking the bus home on my own.
- Frigidaire employee park: Thanks to my best friend’s father’s employee pass, we spent many summer nights enjoying free Starlight movies. My dad worked for another General Motors division in town, one that had no such benefits.
- Troop trails: My Boy Scout troop had a long hike one Sunday a month, in addition to a primitive camping weekend. Our routes often followed a river or crossed farmlands or even trekked along railroad tracks. I remember especially a few that traced the abandoned Miami-Erie Canal with its mule bank and its eerie remains of limestone locks left in vines and trees.
- Suicide Hill: A decent snowfall (quite modest by what I’ve experienced since) meant sledding at Hills and Dales Park. How insignificant the slope looks now, but there were some serious injuries. I had a near call.
- Memorial Hall: It really wasn’t designed for concerts, but it’s where the Philharmonic performed, and since my dad had access to tickets, I heard many top soloists. Hard to believe now, actually.
- Our big ugly high school: built in the 1960s and long since torn down. In my memory, I recall it more than the older but equally ugly elementary school.
- Yellow Springs: Once I got my driver’s license, the bohemian town in Greene County, home of Antioch College, became a welcome retreat. Its funky stores, before funky was a word in my consciousness, were mind-expanding. Nowhere else could we find Earl Grey or gunpowder tea or sticks of incense or perfumed soaps. Then there was the professional summer theater series at the amphitheater, itself a revelation. By that time, I was in love, at last. And that leads to mention of a covered bridge by moonlight: Yes, making out afterward in the moonlight at a covered bridge that’s no longer existent down an unpaved road.
- The Art Theater: Where I first saw foreign films, black-and-white alternatives to Hollywood’s commercial concoctions. And then there was the Lemon Tree coffee house next door with its folk music and blues.
My, all that was a world ago in my life.
Jnana's Red Barn 