It would appear that I am ending the same way, as a full service book maker.  Yes, I have a book coming out from a university press in a couple of months, published in the conventional way, and yes, my book on writing novels is about to be published by a smaller press, and yes, I intend to continue to get attention (and cash) from large commercial presses.

But this digital age is allowing me to have a wonderful time making books again.  I am formatting some of our Hamilton Stone Editions books for e-readers; I keep web sites with information and reviews for Hamilton Stone and for myself.  I am learning how to do a (hard copy) book cover using templates provided by printers, and how to make a book block that is readable and attractive.

One of the most wonderful things about childhood has always been that healthy human young are generalists: they dance and sing and throw balls and cook and run and pick flowers and pretend and make art and act and tell stories.  Growing up is, from one angle, all about specializing.  By the teen years,  some of us are athletes, some are Brains, some are artsy, some are musical, some already making money.

So I feel that this digital world is  enlarging my scope again.

To some extent, the Web makes it possible for you to do this again.  The big gap here is the difference between web structures/places that are professionally developed  (you know those web pages:  they are gorgeous; they have roll over links and video and music; they are expensive; nine times out of ten, the professional has to be called in to make even the smallest updates) and the ones like my web pages that still use tables to create a boxy, simple, page like structure.   See http://www.meredithsuewillis.com and http://www.hamiltonstone.org.  It isn’t so much that I am trying to recreate book pages, it’s that this is what I’ve been able to master.  I like them, but I especially like that I can add to them, change them at will.

Or at least as long as the gods of cyberspace are favorably disposed.
I can tinker with (not write) html, the code underlying most web pages,  I can do a little CSS through Dreamweaver, which means I can change the background colors and fonts easily.

I’m limited, but I’m having a good time.

There are, obviously, points on the continuum between homemade sites like mine and the big flashy professional ones.  WordPress, which is here attached to my homemade site, is professionally structured, as is Blogger.com and certainly  Facebook.  You can get free or very cheap templates that someone else created and to which you can add your own text and pictures.

But what I really enjoy is being able to roll my own, as it were:  just as I couldn’t have said when I was making my Black Horsey books if I liked best writing the stories or using the Grown Ups’ stapler, I get very caught up in all the parts of this.  I probably spend too much time at it, trying to figure out what went wrong, why the font is too big or too small– it feels, in many ways, like a hobby.

In other ways, it feels like seizing control of the means of production. Which may be exactly where we are, on this ledge, looking down at the abyss of commercialism and time-wasting, and up at a firmament of democratic creativity.