Well, here it is, my distraction these past few months, gathering up images and putting words together. What's it about, it's about me and my early attempts at drawing and painting landscape from my first attempts up to recent times. Is it an important piece of literature, not really, just my attempt to share, and more importantly to me, to archive in a manner of speaking, some of my art. Should you, where ever and who ever you are, wish to preview a few pages click on this link and it will take you to my publisher...
There may be a sequel, a Part Two, to this effort to bring together my sketches and paintings as we travelled across Canada, and down into the American Southwest. We'll see. I'm growing older, and surprisingly, at least to me, my art and writing is becoming less and less important. Two reasons, as I don't receive a royalty for possible sales of my books ( my choice), I have no record of the fact that anyone is reading what I write, and secondly, as print-on-demand books of this nature are terribly expensive, I believe that there will be few, if any, sales. My only incentive for publishing a sequel would be to have a copy to remind me in my older age of what I attempted to accomplish.
Technology, I find it interesting that years ago when I started making books I lauded technology as the saviour for those who were being rejected by publishers. Self publishing combined with the internet was a boon to those who would be writers of all ilk. Now, I'm not so certain. It's true that many are publishing, but with currency exchange, taxes, and such, the cost of publishing with paper has gone through the roof, so to speak. Many years ago my first attempt at putting a book together proved to be too expensive. It was, I was told, going to cost almost $200.00 for a 100 page book. Back then I abandoned the project and resorted to PDF files. Fast forward to the present, my latest creation cost me in excess of $200.00 to publish a single copy, and was only possible because the publisher offered a deep discount bring the price down to somewhere around $150.00. Fortunately, the cost of producing and selling a PDF copy is less than $10.00. But, PDF files are falling out of favour being replaced by ebooks, another technology... with a learning curve. I'm now faced with having to backtrack and rewrite past achievements to ebooks involving precious time. Perhaps, it's time to retire content with past achievements? Such is the fate of growing older.....?
