Proceed with Hesitance

I read a couple of stories previously published by the company where I submitted my story. If my story is accepted, I should be in some really good company. There are a lot of talented writers in their work.

I did more simulated flight today with Microsoft Flight Simulator X. I wanted to use X-Plane on my iMac, but configuring the software will take more than a couple of nights. So, I defaulted to using the PC downstairs for MS FS X. It works nice and it has a C-172 with a Garmin G-1000, the type of plane I’ll flying.

Speaking of which, I’m still trying to decide whether I should get a flight instructor to go up with me. It’s been several months since I flew, so I want to make sure I’m doing it right. I also have my bi-annual flight review in September, which I really need to get cracking on.

I started reading Madame Xanadu from DC/Vertigo. So far, so good, a neat book with heavy occult influence. I’d love to read a series of graphic novels like these.

I cut out 6 signatures of 24 pages each and folded them up last night. I think I’ll need to keep going for the full 8 signatures. That’s a lot of pages though. The final book will be 192 pages long. I’m sticking with the same size as the previous one (#13), but I’ll be using a two-toned backing by doing the spine and covers on one piece of book leather, and the final cover wrapping with two other pieces of book leather. This means I’ll be chewing up book leather at a rather rapid rate.

I was reading an advice column today about which books to read to be “well-rounded”. The list was, well, just awful. Almost no genre fiction, no female writers, it just wasn’t all that “well-rounded” itself. I’m not sure you can even come up with a list of books to read to be considered “well-rounded”. Maybe if you focused in on a single area, you might be able to do it, but even then, it seems like you’d always be missing someone’s favorite or some seminal book. My solution, read what you want, and the rest will sort itself out.

My quest for “healthy” candy continues. I was hoping to find some licorice that wasn’t loaded with HFCS, but to no avail. I might just have to resort to ordering online. Not my ideal solution, but that’s the way it goes.

Moving towards Armageddon

After looking at last night’s photos of my bookbinding project, I really need to start using a tripod. Too many of my bookphotos are blurry from the slight hand jitter and the low light levels. From this point onward, I’m hoping to improve the quality of photos I’ll be posting on here.

I have a couple of different bookbinding projects that I want to try as part of the overall 27.5 Empty Buddha’s project. I’d like to try some coptic binding and other more artistic representations of books, but I’ll get through a couple of standard style books before I get too crazy with the artististic flairs. As it is, I think I’ll be spending the next couple of nights just trimming up the pages for the signatures. I have 48 of them to cut, and I can get about 6-8 per 30 minutes. Yeah, this will take a while. Fortunately, everything goes rather quickly after that.

I’ve been reading Bookbinding The Classic Arts and Crafts Manual by Douglas Cockerell on my ebook reader. Being able to glimpse at the views of someone over 100 years ago about something like bookbinding is strange. Most of what the author says is fairly accurate even today. I’m hoping to glean some hints on how to do more traditional book binding with tapes and leather by reading the book. I have two other books that should be helpful in that arena too.

I settled on a design for my I – The Magician card. I have part of it sketched out, but again, I haven’t inked it. I’m going to ink 0 – The Fool card tonight.

I continue to have great luck with the Morgan Tarot. I’m not sure why I connect so well with this deck, but it really works for me. And once again, I have managed to select a deck that has off the beaten path artwork.

27.5 Empty Buddhas

Since I reference it often enough with my bookbinding project, I thought I’d give an explanation of what the 27.5 Empty Buddhas project is all about.

A couple of years ago, Erica and I were down at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival when we walked into an artist booth. The artist normally did pencil sketches of animals and such. However, at the back of his booth, he had a series of pottery bowls and a small plaque explaining their existence.

They were a cathartic art project he had gotten from another artist who did something similar. I believe he was planning to make 100 or 1,000 bowls, I don’t recall which. I thought it was a pretty neat idea, but I didn’t think much of it beyond that.

Flash forward to early this year. I read about one of the recognized Japanese survivors of both atomic bombs, Tsutomu Yamaguchi. He had died, but appeared to live a full and useful life. He had a set of drawings commemorating the pilgrimage of the 88 Buddhas of Shikoku which he colored in by hand.

This really inspired me. Both of these events set in motion an idea in my head. I wanted to do an art project of my own. My current passion was book binding, so that’s what I would do. The rest of the project fell into place over a couple of weeks.

The first bit is the rather odd designation, 27.5 Empty Buddhas. The number, 27.5, is a combination of two ideas. The first, in honor of my brother, the number 27. It’s his favorite number, and like all good art projects, it has special meaning for me too. The 0.5 added on? Well, that’s because the first book in the project wasn’t actually fully created by me. It was a kit I had purchased from Hollander’s and put together to gain experience at book binding. Since it’s not really entirely my creation, I decided to designate it as #0.5.

The Empty Buddhas part is formed from two other elements. One, my misreading/misremembering of the obituary article in The Economist. Two, I liked the sound of Empty Buddha, and it makes sense within the context of Buddhism. The books can be filled with thoughts, imbuing them with Buddha nature of your own, or they can exist blank, possessing their own Buddha nature.

All of this combined into the final project, 27.5 Empty Buddhas. I’ll distribute the books to various people in and out of my life as I complete them. There is some thought to keeping all of them (except #0.5, which has already been sent away) and sending them out when I’m done. I’m still working on that part, the project isn’t done yet.

Finally, the first scratch made book I finished, I was thinking of declaring it as a “test” or #0, but I’m going to reverse that idea. That will be book #13. The book that I intend to keep for myself.