Earlier today, I wanted to paginate a picture-book manuscript I'm thinking about, to see how the text would play out over 32 pages; so I went on the Internet to see if there was an easy template for thumbnail illustrations that I could download and print out. Alas and alack, the Internet did not provide! So I whipped up a thumbnails template of my own in Microsoft Word, as seen above, and I bestow it upon the Internet for free downloading here. You're welcome, 'nettie dear.While we're on the subject of cool Internet things, do you know about Zamzar.com? It's my very favorite file conversion service, which transformed the Word doc of my thumbnails to the JPEG image above in thirty seconds flat. Feel free to leave any other genuinely useful sites in the comments.
And hey, while I have your attention:
- Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich (Eighth Grade Superzero) and Francisco X. Stork (Marcelo in the Real World, The Last Summer of the Death Warriors) will both be appearing at the Brooklyn Book Festival Youth Stoop this Sunday. They're both as wonderful in person as their books are on the page -- do check them out.
- The next night, September 13, is Kidlit Drink Night! 6:30 p.m. at the Ginger Man.
- In January, I'm going to lead the editorial strand at the ever-wonderful Kindling Words East. The fabulous E. Lockhart will lead the author strand; the brilliant Mordecai Gerstein the illustrator strand. (Note that the dates this year conflict with SCBWI Midwinter in New York.) Registration opens and closes this Sunday, Sept. 12, so mark your calendars to enter the lottery in a timely fashion.