Authoring

This year for Christmas, I gave my parents copies of a book called A year in the garden, 2006. It was my book. I made it with my garden and flower photos that I'd taken over, yeah - 2006. (You can see the photos in a Flickr set)

I ordered a copy for myself, too, as a record of the gardening year. The Vol-in-Law opened the package first. He was not impressed. See, I'd done a book of our trip to America over Christmas 2005 using a different company based in Britain. For a variety of reasons using that company again for gift giving in America just wasn't practical - and yes the Qoop book from 2006 wasn't quite as good - mostly because I didn't have any real control over layout, text size, backgrounds, etc. etc.

The Vol-in-Law does not hold back on his constructive criticism and accused me of being cheap and lazy (all too true, I'm afraid). But he conceded that since my parents hadn't seen the photo book from our trip to America - maybe they just wouldn't know any better and would think the gift was alright.

Well, my parents seemed to be fooled anyway - as I got good feedback on the book - or perhaps I got good feedback on the photos and the book didn't detract from the images too much.

Anyway, he told me that next year I had better raise my game. I don't reckon I'm giving away the game too much, but we're already planning to give my parents and his a photo book of Cletus and his first months - (we might sneak a few flower pics in too). If I know my mom, she'll have anticipated something like that already. But I won't have to go back to the slow-to-use and kinda expensive British photo book company. No, I've found a new one - www.blurb.com via an American expat blogger Jackie Danicki who was working on a cook book.

So I checked it out. I haven't yet had a printed version done yet, but I've been working on a book of our French vacation in September and I'm really impressed by the ease of handling the photos (you can pull them in from your Flickr account in case like me - you happen to have photos on different PCs) and the flexibility of the layouts. It means that not only can I include my photos - but also the text - since I blogged my vacation. I've really been having fun pulling it together.

I've even suggested to Genderist that she pull a cookbook together based on family recipes for her sister's wedding. My aunt Virginia gave me a handwritten book for my wedding that I still use.