The Important Book about Majuro by Mr. Savu's fourth grade class is now available for sale on Amazon.com. Click here to see it!

The book costs $8.42, which is the at-cost price (60 full-color pages). We do not receive any royalties on any of the children's books, so please be sure to donate on our designated WorldTeach donation page.

We hope you enjoy the book! Anybody who has spent any time in Majuro will recognize some key elements that the children captured

This morning Laura Sundblad and I were interviewed by Heather Jarvis, a journalist for Radio Australia. We spoke about how the project got started, and how the pilot project went, and what's going to happen next for the children in the Marshall Islands. We felt it went really well and we were able to express most of the important aspects of the project. If you haven't done it yet, don't forget to donate!

Primary school students write an 'Important Book about Majuro' | ABC Radio Australia

Dear Friends,

We are excited to announce that the body of children’s literature in the Marshall Islands is about to undergo a transformation. For the 2012–2013 academic year, WorldTeach Marshall Islands has partnered with The Unbound Bookmaker, an online publishing business that will take the stories from students all around the Marshall Islands and publish those stories on Amazon.com in the form of a class book. The children will have the opportunity, with the help of their WorldTeach volunteer, to write, revise, edit, illustrate, and finally receive their own copy of the book at the end of the school year.

I haven't updated this blog very frequently—too many good things have happened and there's not enough time in the day to chronicle it all. But, I would like to start using this blog to provide updates on how The Unbound Bookmaker Project is coming.

Sorry for the long absence. I have had quite a few projects on my plate—and still do. My tutorial practice has been usurped by real-world experience, so I'm not complaining. I would like to post here, however, that at the end of last year The Unbound Bookmaker produced a complete book, entitled The Next America: Moving Beyond a Fragile Economy.

I worked with the author, Don Holbrook, from start to finish. He gave me the raw manuscript, and I first did the ghostwriting. Since this is a political book, and he and I have different political opinions and philosophies, I had to be very careful that I kept my voice and my opinions out of the book. We worked for several months on the manuscript, with many emails and reviews going back and forth.

It was a great article to edit. Written by Dominika Borowicz at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Title: "A Coming of Age: Germans Deal with Their Past through Memory Literature." http://tinyurl.com/6l7qk9l

I'm happy to report that with the help of Carol Phillips (illustrator) and Sarah Jacquier (co-editor), the Dippolds' book went from scattered chapters to an edited manuscript to a typeset document to a fully designed book available on Amazon. It is the definition of The Unbound Bookmaker at its finest: helping an author from manuscript to printed book. Here is the summary of It's Not What I'm Eating . . . It's What's Eating Me!:

One day, Dot was contemplating her life with an alcoholic father, husband, and son. Someone commented on the food she was eating and her ongoing problem with an ulcer. She responded, “It’s not what I’m eating . . . it’s what’s eating me!” Len Dippold (Dot’s son) and his faithful wife, Daffy, discuss the healing needed not only for the addicted but also the loved ones of the addicted. Using plenty of wisdom, humor, and personal stories, they show how programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon have helped them in the process of overcoming this family disease. This book is sure to spark insights on how you too can overcome your challenges and addictions.

It has been a great project. To break up the seriousness of the subject, the Dippolds added a quotation of wisdom at the beginning of each chapter and a joke at the end of each chapter. Even though I don't have an alcoholic addiction myself or in my immediate family, there are certain chapters in this book that I particularly appreciated and made me want to be a better person. I don't consider this a self-help book; I consider it a recognition that you CAN'T do it all by yourself, that you need a Higher Power and your family and friends to both face your problems and conquer them.

Working on the autobiographical history of my grandfather was a very rewarding project, from start to finish: working with my fellow editor Suzy Bills to clean up the manuscript, working with my grandmother and my aunts and uncles to get their input and their stories and their pictures, and preparing the work for publication using Photoshop and InDesign and Lulu. Here is the result:

Today's tutorial comes from this site. It was a little difficult to follow exactly because they had an old version of Photoshop and they were using a PC. I used a fun picture I took while playing with my son at The Pit Park (everybody brings their old or unused toy cars). The effect wasn't exactly the same because I had to use a different texture than they did, but it was still useful because I learned how to feather a picture (New Layer, use the Marquee tool and then Inverse to get a frame, feather it using Modify-->Feather (25 pixels in my case), and then fill it with white using option + backspace.