Monthly Archives: March 2018

Learning From Wilsonia, Part III

Self-publishing The Cabins of Wilsonia led me to new skills, experiences, people, and places.

As with most things in life, it comes down to people. Think about jobs you’ve had: if you are like me, you have probably learned that it is better to do difficult and unpleasant tasks with great people than to do good jobs with awful people.

Publishing The Cabins of Wilsonia was a great project with fantastic people. I took very few people photos while working on the book, but here is a little peek at a few of the folks who influenced, assisted, and added joy to the project.

Learning From Wilsonia, Part II

The new skills I acquired by publishing The Cabins of Wilsonia led to these experiences:

Editing, photo-editing, designing, and publishing with Louise A. Jackson Trail of Promises, the account of a stock party’s attempts to complete the John Muir Trail.
Designing, drawing and publishing five coloring books for grownups: Heart of the Hills, Heart of Mineral King, Heart of Exeter, Heart of the Parks, and Heart of Agriculture.
Editing, photo-editing, designing, and publishing with Louise A. Jackson the second edition of The Visalia Electric Railroad: Stories of the Early Years.

Almost all of those books are available for sale on the Books page of my other website.( It is slow to load because of all the images – don’t give up!)

Learning From Wilsonia, Part I

Publishing The Cabins of Wilsonia filled my life with new skills, experiences, people, and places.

Look at this list of skills:

Using a laptop – before this project, my sole computer experience was on desktops.
Preparing pencil drawings using a scanner, a real scanner, not just a bargain print/fax/scan/copy thing that sounds like a deal until it needs ink (a week after you buy it).
Adobe Photoshop Elements – Adobe is completely non-intuitive to this Apple-girl. Elements is the “easy” version of Photoshop. . . fall down laughing.
Adobe InDesign – even now, seven years after beginning the book, each time I open up InDesign to begin a new project, it feels almost as if I have never seen the program before. I say that I “learned” to use it, but those lessons were hard won and hard to hang onto.

Next time, you’ll see a list of what these skills led me to.

The Blog Awakens From a Coma

The Cabins of Wilsonia was published and arrived in December, 2014. After about a year, this blog went into a coma. A series of phishy sounding emails arrived, which caused me to make one of those long-waits-on-hold type of phone calls, and as a result, this blog has been revived!

Just over 3 years after receiving the book, I’m happy to resume writing about it.

I sold enough to cover my expenses; thank you for asking.

Many of the original drawings remain; again, thank you for asking. You may email me at cabinart at cabinart dot net (written that way for web security purposes) if you are interested in a particular cabin drawing. Why email? Because the contact form is not working, and I’d rather write a blog post than make another one of those long-waits-on-hold type of phone calls.

(Yes, I assume a great deal about the thoughts of my readers. Don’t worry–I am not a mind-reader.)

There are still books available, now at the bargain price of $50, including tax and mailing (in the USA only). This is the page for that transaction.

The process of publishing the book was HUGE. It took four years, and in another post I will list the things that came out of the experience.