moving day

Because of changes at Blogger that are really not working for me, I am moving my blog to http://mmjustus.wordpress.com/. I hope you'll change your links and come visit me there!

blog touring some more

Kathleen Ernst, who writes historical fiction (including some of the American Girl books) and who used to do living history performances for a living, is hosting me on her blog:

http://sitesandstories.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/meet-meg-justus/

This one's about the Job Carr Cabin Museum and quilting in public [g].

A terrific review

This author business is still new enough to me that when I get a new review I have a tendency to jump up and down just a little.

http://ndrosen.livejournal.com/416090.html

Anyway, it was lovely.

a new cover

I have a confession to make. When I first published Repeating History last summer, I really had no idea of how to make a cover, very rudimentary knowledge of Adobe InDesign, and not much else. Since then I've learned just a little more, and this is the result:

The pocketwatch is a public domain image. The geyser is a photo of Grand Geyser that I took the day I had the inspiration for the book in question (it's the same photo that's on the old cover, but I lightened the photo for the old cover to make the title stand out). The banner is because the colors in the geyser photo run the gamut from almost black to almost white, and make it impossible (at least with the skills I have at my disposal) to keep it from washing out almost any letter color or pattern I chose. The banner colors are chosen from the photo.

The lettering is two variations of woodgrain, via Photoshop. The font is akaPosse, from dafont.com.

I would love to know what you think of it. Please tell me.

and on to another stop

On the blog tour.

http://romancingthewest.blogspot.com/2012/03/mm-justus-repeating-history.html

Jacquie was a very good interviewer, and on Thursday she will also be posting an article I wrote with some photos I took.

another blog interview!

The Dames of Dialogue are graciously hosting me, with an interview about how Repeating History came to be.

and the new exhibit opens!

The introductory panel

The first large panel and one of the timelines.
I designed and created all of the graphics myself this time.

No one had kept a yard sign stowed away for seventeen years
(the election was in 1995), so I created one.

Another large vinyl panel with wood in the background.
The water tower photo is one I took.

The first display case. I had very few artifacts to work with.
These are documents used during the cityhood campaign.

The large panel is an artifact.
The smaller text panels are quotations from the interviews I did
with the people who were involved in the cityhood campaign.

The second exhibit case, which is a bit more interesting,
with a couple of T-shirts and campaign buttons,
and the insert about the celebration that was
in the local paper,and a copy of the voter's pamphlet.


The third vinyl panel, and one of the six timelines.
The timelines were designed with Lakewood symbolism
in mind -- water and bark and acorns -- and the
city colors as a stripe down the middle.

The only photos I had to work with
were of the cityhood celebration, and so
were heavily weighted towards the end of the exhibit.

The exhibit was controversial enough that I had a very
difficult time finding people who were both anti-incorporation
and willing to be interviewed (one fellow even hung up
on me). So presenting an unbiased viewpoint was almost
impossible. This was our compromise, which hangs above a
corkboard with a supply of pushpins and index cards.
You can see the bark I used as a background for some
of the text panels more clearly here, too.

I wish I could show you more of what the exhibit was actually about, but the size of the photos makes that very difficult.

I have to say that this was my very first attempt at designing graphics from scratch (the museum used a graphic designer for the first exhibit), and I'm pretty proud of them. I used InDesign, mostly, but the introductory panel was adapted from the one for the first exhibit, for continuity's sake, and used Illustrator because that's what my predecessor had used. The rest of it's all me, though [g].