Over the past three days, I’ve brought you to the point where the stories were finished. Margie Deeb took these and created a beautiful .pdf for us, which you’ll be able to download for free (yes, FREE!) on Wednesday. She chose an elegant style, with black and white graphics for each story, sort of a wood-block look, times new roman font for the text, and a modern font for the story titles. She also set up a table of contents, to ease moving around in the .pdf. We each wrote bios for the end of the book. I can’t even imagine all of the hours which she put into this. She caught typos, and sent our chapters to us for proof-reading, link-checking, etc. This was all volunteer, guys!
James Lee Schmidt, with our input (and a lot of that!) wrote an introduction. He helped Angie with the cover, and Margie put it all together into the document. Finally, we proofed it, and we had a product!!! Yippee! But we weren’t done, yet. I’ll talk about that tomorrow. Right now, though, it’s time for you to meet James.
James Lee Schmidt
He looks awfully serious, doesn’t he? This photo could be a Rembrandt, or some other Dutch Master, like Vermeer, especially with that hat….
Anyway, Mosaic was James’ idea. We were all enrolled in The Story Cartel Course, sending stories back and forth, and chatting, when he asked if anyone wanted to put together a compilation. A few of us signed on, and the book was born. He took the lead in setting up ground rules and making decisions. He was also a great cheerleader and techie support.
James is the author of Strange Tales of the Oskaloosa Oddities Society. He wrote a story for Mosaic about re-finding one’s inner child and understanding that succeeding at work isn’t everything. The story centers around an uncle taking his niece to a theme park, when he doesn’t want to. You can find him at jamesleeschmidt.com
As James says “it takes a village to raise a writer.”