Pixel Pushin'

 I have absolutely no pretense of being an artistic wizard. I'm barely a crayon totin' acolyte, still attempting to color (approximately) within the lines. Since I'm self-publishing on basically a negative budget, I'm making the usual self-pub tradeoffs. Writing the book, it turns out, is the relatively easy part. Making it lovely is something that I'm grappling with, and having to dust off the underused corners of my brain to manage. I have just enough vocabulary to know what the basics are that I'm trying to accomplish, and at least have a vision to know what to aim for. Execution is where it's falling a little, let's say, flat.

At this point, with one book out the door, my expectations are low. What I'm trying to remember is that the bar to failure is actually quite high. I've self-published before... once... over a decade ago. There are numerous problems with that first book, but, as was the case then and even more now, it was a drop in the content ocean. We are always our own biggest and strongest critics, and nobody shouts as loudly as our own inner voices.

So: I am trying to be gentle with myself as as I go through repeat watchings of Inkscape tutorials to manage filter imports. I am trying to accept the student mindset as I open W3schools in one window and Sigil in another and Scrivener in a third as I repeatedly try to sort through the mysteries of CSS transmogrifications. I am learning the craft of pushing pixels around in the same slow plod that it took me to learn pushing letters, and words, and sentences, and plots into place. It's gonna take a while. I'm a stubborn rhino. But even new tricks can get through this thick skin, in time.

🧩🦏