RWA and Bookplates for You

RWA National Conference is upon us again!  Meredith and I will be there, not with bells on exactly, but with enough wide-eyed eagerness that you can’t really see our deadline-induced raggedness underneath.

We will both be signing at the Literacy Autographing, which is open to the public.

Wednesday, July 15
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Exhibit Hall

I was reading Joanna Bourne’s blog a while back and Jo, much better prepared than either Meredith or I, had custom bookplates printed ahead of time so that she could give them to readers who already had her books at home.   And I thought, what a great idea.  I emailed Jo and asked her about it, she very kindly emailed me back with step-by-step instruction on how to obtain similar bookplates.  Alas, then I asked the crucial question: How long would it take?

Well, there just wasn’t enough time.  So I abandoned the idea for a while.  But then I since I regularly make bookplates from mailing labels–not very pretty ones by the way, just functional–I thought, oh, what the heck, let me give it a try at home.

So for Meredith, I took the masthead from her website and shrank it down to fit a 1″ x 2 5/8″ label.

For myself, I did a little photoshopping and came up with this:

Pretty, non?

I have to be honest though, as they didn’t come out of my home printer, with its much tortured color cartrige, which I have been ruthlessly refilling the way the French force feed their foie gras geese, quite as beautifully as they are rendered here.  The first batch for mine was good, but Meredith’s was a bit on the blue side, so I surmised that it was because there wasn’t enough yellow ink.

I took the cartridge to the bathroom and began to ram yellow ink down its gullet.  But of course I put too much, as always.  So second batch for Meredith has one row that is quite, um, autumnal.  But that’s okay, as grass can be yellow.  But it wrecked much greater havoc with mine and produced green skies!

Now I ripped out the cartridge again, intending to put in more blue ink to correct for the overabundance of yellow, only to have blue ink ooze out on its own.  At which point I hastily blotted cartridge, bathroom sink, and my blue-black fingers and cried, “I quit this b*tch!”

Where was I?  Oh, ahem, well, yes, off-color (no pun intended) or not, Meredith and I still have a small supply of bookplates.  Please do come say hi and get a signed bookplate or two for your collection at home.  We’ll even supply you with “Autographed by Author” stickers for you to put on the covers.  (Yes, Meredith, you can has them too.)

This is going to be so much fun.  🙂

(And if my fingers are still blue tomorrow evening, you’ll know why!)