Pretty Pictures and Strange Prose

I am pleased to report that I am at a point in my computer graphics skills where I can turn a poorly lit photograph of a pencil-on-lined-paper sketch into this...

...which I can then turn into...

...a beautiful, full-color, fully-scalable vector image!

I know I'm tooting my own horn, but I feel pretty proud of myself.

Besides, who else's horn would I toot?

All this is over one of the textbooks I'm writing for the Three Sisters Learning Path, and my bad decision to start formatting it even though I'm only halfway through the content. I do tend to get carried away with formatting, which is what happened here. Any book needs a title page, so I looked up sample book title pages, only to find that they all had the publisher's logo displayed at the bottom! I knew I would be self-publishing, which meant... Three Sisters needed a logo that would look good on a title page. Well, here we are.

So now you know my secret. I'm writing a word family reader! But not a gross one... I hope.

I'm kind of disgusted by most of the word family readers out there. They all seem to be full of strange themes and garish pictures. I want this one to be fun to read, and without too much to distract from the words. Plus, I can't turn down thirty-something prompts for fun poetic exercises.

I know you're just itching to here some of the things I've written for the book. I'm not sure whether these are prose or poetry--I think they're something in between--but they're fun to write and read (at least I think so). Here are a few of my favorites:

Once there was a cat called Kate. Kate went on a date with a rat. The rat was late to the date. When the rat came, he sat on Kate's plate. Kate the cat ate the rat.

A sailor called Bill told a whale of a tale. He said he got his ship on sale and ate nothing but stale bread, kale, and pale ale. He sleeps on a bale of hay.

The Monster Mash is quite a bash. It's a bash I'd like to crash! Monsters flash and gnash their teeth, and all wear clothes that clash! They thrash on the dance floor and splash in the punch. You've never seen monsters act so brash! It's a mad dash to pay cash for a ticket to the Monster Mash.

I just hope my sense-of-humor is appropriate for first graders.

You'll be hearing more from me soon.