2015 has been a busy year both personally and
professionally. I’ve done the usual juggling of long term and short term video projects
for great clients like Domtar, American Family Insurance and People’s State
Bank. I completed a documentary that will hopefully make a difference for
Wisconsin tribes and Native children. I’ve been providing marketing assistance on
a $23.1 grant project received by Northcentral Technical College and the
Wisconsin Technical College System. But of all the projects I completed this
year, the one that I found the most exhilarating – and terrifying – was publishing
a book.
For the past 10 years a photographer friend, Irene
MacFarland, and I have been exchanging prompts on a monthly basis. At the
beginning of the month she sends me a photo and I send her a short story or
poem. By the end of the month, we are responsible for creating a response to the other’s prompt. As you can imagine, we’ve accumulated quite a collection of
material, and decided, what the heck, we’ll put a book together in our spare
time. And so it began.
Our first step was to review our accumulated efforts. There
were some pieces that either she or I felt didn’t measure up, so they were set
aside. (We went through a few rounds of this process.) When we had winnowed the
items to a manageable pile, we began searching for a theme. We finally settled
on four elements, and the title, Elemental.
After we arranged our work into four chapters (Earth, Fire,
Water and Air) and created a flow within the chapters, we turned our attention
to revisions. We both went through my writing hunting for typos (and I smoothed
out lumpy phrasing here and there), reviewed photo and writing titles, examined
photo quality and chose a cover image. We wrestled with page size and format,
font choices and a myriad of other tiny details that mostly go unnoticed while
reading a book but that contribute to the overall impression in the end.
Layout took a while because we were working on two different
versions of the same program, so what looked perfect on one computer was
completely messed up on the other. We uploaded PDFs to Box for review purposes,
but tried converting the PDF back to a Word doc and were met with chaos. We
planned a mini book layout retreat at a north woods cabin, and spent the
weekend reformatting the book from scratch. Needless to say the result was a
better looking book, but also an exhausted and ever so slightly crabby writer
and photographer.
When layout was complete and we had combed through the
manuscript several times, we secured our library of congress number, ISBN
number (from another writer I know who has established his own publishing
company), bar code and copyright registration. We had already solicited printing
quotes and selected a printer.
Once the project was in the printer’s hands, self-doubt
kicked in. I was sure that the writing wasn’t good enough. We should have gone
with a different layout. It should have been organized differently. This was
all so personal, and now we were putting it all out into the world. My family
and friends – and gasp, maybe even strangers – would know what a warped
individual I am after reading all these scenarios that arose from my oddball
imagination.
But, too late now. The gate is open and the book lives. Now,
what’s next on my bucket list?
Susan
Reetz, of Rucinski & Reetz Communication, is a writer/director/producer for
film, video and web. Her scriptwriting and producing work has earned numerous
local, national, and international awards. She also writes feature articles,
brochure copy, news releases, web copy and other promotional materials. She can
be reached at 715-212-6239 or Reetz@RucinskiReetz.com.
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