So, it turns out, if you want to make a full-color book with a ton of pages, it's expensive to produce. So expensive, that if I were to price it in a range that would allow anyone to want to buy it, I would get negative royalties (insert sad trombone sound here).

So, the illustrations have been divided up, and I'm publishing two books! I tried to divide them evenly, so as not to get too many quotations from one source in each book, separated birds and bugs, etc... But now that I've been working with and formatting the two different sets of illustrations, there's definitely one book I like better. I won't tell you which one.

I just painstakingly finished a picture of a beetle... and decided I didn't like it. Time to start over. It was just too busy and it was difficult to tell it was a beetle, and didn't really have the same feel as the other illustrations thus far.

Although, now that I'm looking at it in a smaller form, it's not so bad. Still, though, I think I like the replacement I came up with a little better.

It was gonna be brilliant (maybe).

It was going to utilize the within-book linking capabilities of e-books. And modern technology-driven themes. And conflict, oh the conflict.

But, alas, fizzle-sputter-die.

Here's the problem: I am not a writer. At least not yet. I know what you're going to say; I've heard it before. But I don't even have aspirations of becoming a writer. Mostly I just like books. I like reading words that sing. And I like art—all kinds of art—art that makes me want to look at it longer and closer. And beautiful layouts; just the right spacing between the everything. And good editing: everything spelled correctly and every bit of punctuation either accurate or purposeful. And well-curated, well-illustrated information.

I like aesthetically exquisite objects.

I'm going to make an aesthetically exquisite object, or at least I'm going to try. Here I go.