In Which I Finish My Book For Ardoch!

Today was a good day for me.

As you will know, I’ve been doing a book project for Ardoch Youth Foundation, as Writer In Residence at one of the disadvantaged primary schools Ardoch helps. (They also look after secondary schools, like my own, but the WIR program is aimed at younger kids). 

For the last few weeks, I’ve been going out to this school to run writers’ workshops. In the end, it was just a matter of getting them started with prompts and talking to them about what they were doing. And there were some good responses to my suggestions too, and to those of the other teacher volunteer. The class teacher chose kids she thought might enjoy it , so they really didn’t want to listen to me teaching, they just wanted to get on with it. 

But we had only five hours altogether. And the kids were required to run around the oval before class, leaving even less time. The teacher was pretty good. She gave the kids extra time in class when they needed it.

As for me, I was aware that some kids were just not going to finish their stories, which, as I told them, looked like the openings of novels! And some started with a great burst of enthusiasm and fizzled out. 

So I did what I would have done with my Year 7 or 8 classes: I gave them the option of either an acrostic poem or an “about me” which they could write by answering questions in a template I’d prepared. Only one of them ended up doing the “about me” and his twin sister wrote an acrostic poem with her name in it, so I put them together in the layout. 

Quite a lot of them did acrostics, almost half. That meant that when I was deciding the order of pieces I was able to alternate stories with poems. There are quite a variety of items too. One young man really wasn’t keen to try fiction, but he does enjoy non fiction and wrote a piece about reptiles and mammals, choosing three. It was illustrated with a charming Komodo dragon. Another young man wrote about a ferret that escaped from its cage every night to visit its family in the wild - the boy told me he had a whole menagerie at home! We had  a fan fiction tale based on The Worst Witch TV series - quite a funny one! We had a space story in which the young heroine is invited to NASA to become an astronaut! It began “Once upon a long light year ago...” I think that young lady might just have a future in professional writing, don’t you? When I arrived early one day, she insisted on showing me her skills on the monkey bars, as a potential future astronaut training activity. 

Some kids barely made it - I have to thank the teacher, who emailed me their work to scan. In fact, the very last piece arrived only this morning, from a young lady who had been absent during the final session. It was about the beach and summer and had a delightful drawing of the sea and sand and a hammock between palm trees. I put it on the last page, as a nice ending. 

I had fun and games with my files, though. My scanned PDFs were fine - I just needed to use the “select” tool to paste them into Pages. I started everything in Pages because it allows you to save as high-resolution PDF - if Word does that, I haven’t yet figured out how. And I needed to create a single file of the complete book. But late last night, for no reason I could figure out, my new Pages files wouldn’t let me type anything or scroll to the next page. I must have touched some option or other that prevents editing, but I’m not sure what. I’ll ask my technically skilled friend or my oldest nephew. Meanwhile, I had a book to get out. 

I found that I could still play with older files so I used one and copied and pasted all the individual items into it. Then I saved as PDF and went to bed. This morning, I successfully added the beach poem to the original  and saved again. Off to Ardoch I went, as I had asked to use their equipment. The very kind gentleman in charge of the WIR program sat down and helped me, but when we had printed out the first lot, there were all those errors - you know, when you find the heading on the bottom of a page it doesn’t belong on? Or the picture on the top of the next page? No idea how that happened as it was okay when I saved it last night. The only way it could be fixed was to go back to the original Pages file. Fortunately he had his MacBook Pro with him, so we were able to open it and fix the problem. If he hadn’t been a Mac owner I would hav  been in trouble. We printed out again and this time it was perfect. So he took it to their scanner and did a high-res PDF file, before giving me the printout. He agreed to send the file to the printer by DropBox, an app I have never had much luck with. They have to fiddle with the back cover anyway, because the Ardoch logo was, a. the old one and b, a bit blurry. They have a tech there who can Photoshop it. 

So, I was finished! 

“Almost,” he said. Just in case! 

I will be going back in a couple of weeks, when the class is going to present a copy to the local library, which has promised to give the kids a tour of the library and a special storytime, as well as letting them register. The class teacher has been sent some membership forms which, of course, parents have to sign. I don’t think I’ll get to see the book before then, but when I do I will take a photo of the cover for this blog. 

After leaving, I went and found a chocolate shop where I had an iced coffee and three chocolates, as a reward. Then I went to Myers to buy a heater for my mother, whose small heater is gone. Summer or not, she gets cold - and I found the perfect one, which also has a fan option. 

Not as exciting as doing a book, and I even forgot to check out the Myer Christmas Windows, but hey, life goes on!