jolly days news

Three Books: Grendel, Cerberus, Minotaur

Posted in art, books, jolly days news, writers-poetry on May 4th, 2012 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

Three just published books, all exclusively for the Kindle, at the moment:

cover grendel

Grendel, The Demon’s Inner Torment

In this short story, third in the Monsters series, Grendel, the ancient, legendary demon, tells a surprising story — one which we weren’t taught in school.

cover minotaur ebook

The Minotaur’s Tale

A short story in which a powerful being, condemned to dwell in infinite caves, gives his personal perspective.

cover cerberus ebook

Cerberus, Gatekeeper to the Underworld

In this short story,second in the Monsters series, Cerberus, the legendary gatekeeper, a terrifying creature with three snarling heads, reveals himself to be a bored, wise bureaucrat. Alternately conversational, witty and reflective, we get the scoop, up close and personal.

iPad Sketchbook 4

Posted in art, books, jolly days news on July 19th, 2011 by admin – Comments Off

“ipad
iPad Sketchbook 4

This is the fourth in a series of digital sketchbooks containing expressive images created on the iPad. This is an enhanced eBook, with thirty images, and includes sped-up movies which depict the creation of two of the images.

ornament4

The Tribulations

Posted in art, blogging, books, ideas, jolly days news, miscellaneous on April 11th, 2011 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

After a battle with WordPress and obstinate plugins — which resulted in Jolly Days loading as a blank page; and a battle with a cell phone company about its online payment implementation, and not being able to run today —  I’m feeling pecked to death by ducks. Until you realize the context — the greater tribulations of the world — the Arab world in turmoil with uncertain outcome; the devastation in Japan; our president who seems one step behind too often and the Republicans in disarray, the ominous future for the economy if something is not done — it doesn’t make you feel perky.

ornament2

I’ve been working hard to publish more books at the iBookstore; not satisfying creative work, but rather meticulous, mind numbing work. I’m very proud of the result though:

iPad Sketchbook 3
Ira Altschiller: Works on Paper
Ira Altschiller: A Retrospective

and two more to come: picturebooks is what Apple calls them, which are fixed layout books for a better presentation of books which have an emphasis on images.

ornament2

I did want to mention a funny link provided at Jason Kottke’s site

Someone at Yahoo Answers uploaded a page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as his own and asked for comments.

Rated as the best answer / criticism:

You know your story needs more work, so you don’t need anyone to tell you what you already know.

Comment sections are always pretty funny. Some people don’t like the snarkiness, and I’m not a big fan of that aspect, but often there are interesting ideas and commentary as well. It is the mosh pit after all. A financial journalist at bloggingheads said that she always felt that people weren’t asking questions or engaging ideas  in comments sections of weblogs, they were trying to appear smart.

The idea of sending great literature as if written by sender to an established publisher has been done over the years. Rejection letters for masterpieces like War and Peace leaves one agape — like the audience watching The Frankie singing Puttin’ on the Ritz in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Saul Bellow stopped sending his stories to the New Yorker after a full of himself young editor told him how he should correct his piece. Bellow had recently won the Nobel Prize.

iPad Sketchbook 2

Posted in art, books, jolly days news on December 11th, 2010 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

A new eBook at the iBookstore: iPad Sketchbook 2

This new sketchbook has over 100 images and animations depicting the evolution of several drawings. A permanent link is in the iBookstore links area on the navigation column to the right.

ornament2

Site Update: Galleries

Posted in art, jolly days news, site info on October 31st, 2010 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

Updated site galleries:

Selected Work Gallery
This gallery has numerous additions and updates.

In the Recent Paintings Galleries:
Updated Fables series images and added the new series Ancient World.

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There are parallel galleries, with the same images, which were put in this weblog itself — Jolly Days — for ease of access, but the site galleries — in PaintedMatter.com — are better formatted. The Jolly Days galleries as well will soon be updated.

eBooks @iBookstore (Updated)

Posted in art, books, jolly days news on July 2nd, 2010 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

Here are some updated iBookstore links (currently available or soon to be):

iPad Sketchbook

Legends of Ghost Island, Book One

Drawing on Walls

Creative Quotations, Stillness in the Midst of Chaos

25 Secrets of the Muse: A Book of Creative Strategies

A Curmudgeon’s Bestiary

Ancient World

These links will have a permanent home in the sidebar.

ornament2

It was a sometimes frustrating process as there is no direct route to creating an epub — the format used by many eBook vendors — in a form that can be validated and formatted satisfactorily. The epub format is really HTML1 — the most basic web, going back years; it is then wrapped in a compressed zip format. I started by using Adobe CS5 Indesign, part of a recently released suite. Although this application was 19 months in development it could not produce an epub that could be validated. Extraordinary.

Well, it was worth it as the final results look beautiful. The books have also been edited, so they are at present, the most current revision. I should note that the books currently on display at the iBookstore were the first version. Apple has yet to display the current revision, which I assume will be available to all who purchase the currently displayed eBooks when parsed in the next few weeks by Apple.

The other issue, which the iBookstore wrote me that they will be improving: some of the ebooks are not sampled so you can get a full idea of the contents. This, as I say, will soon be remedied as well.

New Book: 25 Secrets of the Muse

Posted in art, ideas, jolly days news on March 24th, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

25muse_med.jpg

A new book of suggestive approaches to creative work. How to self-teach.

63 pages, 6″ x 9″, perfect binding, black and white interior ink, 26 drawings.

Slide show sample of 25 Secrets of the Muse

Under the Hood — Update to Jolly Days

Posted in computers, jolly days news on March 21st, 2009 by Ira Altschiller – Comments Off

I knew my update of Movable Type, the blogging software used on Jolly Days, would not go quickly — hours aggregated to days.

I finally did a clean install which caused issues on importing. But the upgrade — from 2.65 to 4.24 (and now 4.25) — was worth it for the under-the-hood improvements. I sure learned a lot in the process.

There are probably some presentation errors. I know the text parsing on import was munged at times — I’ll try and fix those goofs; the design has been even more simplified so as to be as little distraction as possible. I want the weblog to read easily. Have not been able to test in all browsers.

Hope that the pages load faster, that the weblog has a simplicity that encourages reading, and that the formatting looks good in your browser.

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There are some issues:

* Whether the change in site links from numbers to text-as-is-now-the-default in the URLs will cause problems — internal links and external links breaking.

* Whether the redirect from the old blog will work?

* The parsing of the text via Textile 2 is not working as expected in some areas. I use double dashes a lot to indicate an em dash but it isn’t working anymore — so I’m using an entity.

We’ll see…

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Well, it came over mostly, for which we are grateful.

However, all the formatting has been lost.

The links seem to work and the redirect, using an htaccess RewriteRule, from:

http://www.paintedmatter.com/blog/

to

http://www.paintedmatter.com/jollydays/

is working.

Will just have to figure out how to re-establish the paths to css internally.

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Just an @import path was breaking the formatting.

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Okay, enough of this behind the scenes stuff…