Week 7 Famous Last Words: halfway there...

I got ahead on my class project last weekend, so that means there wasn't a lot to do this week, and I'm really glad I'm staying one week head: it's Week 6 right now, but I'm already finishing up Week 7 this morning. I did microfictions as my last writing for Week 7! The pork stew one did not come out so well but I kind of like the mango one: Anansi and the Mangoes.

Anyway, this summer I'm going to make myself a Canva expert; it's all so new to me. For this experiment, I learned how to use the transparency tool, and I'm sure that will come in useful as I keep learning more.

As you can see, I'm working on Anansi stories, and I'm more-or-less on track to publish the Sufi book later this month and the Anansi book in November. I don't know if I'll meet my target for finishing up the Ramayana stories this month so that I can start prepping that book for December 26, but that will be a nice Christmas present to myself if I can get that done.

And I'm telling myself that somehow I will find time to do NaNoWriMo in November with the Mahabharata project. School will be slowing down some, and I did NaNoWriMo last year... so surely I can at least try to do it this year. That would allow me to get the Mahabharata book done on Feb. 14 (Valentine's Day present, ha ha), which is the end of Week 4 of the Spring semester, plenty of time for using it as a Mahabharata reading option. Even more so if OU goes with the plan they floated about canceling Spring Break and starting the semester one week later.

So, I'm going to record Sufi stories and proofread Anansi and write Ramayana stories this weekend. I don't even want to think about OU politics or national politics: that all just makes me mad. 

Stories are better.

I really need a weekend of stories this weekend! Because if I think about politics, I realize we're fucked. I included the "we're-fucked" cat graphic in the announcements for Friday... and how freaky is that: I queued up those announcements before the news even came out about Trump getting the COVID! 

So, I'm going to go jump in at Twitter to do the #UngradingSlowChat for today but when I'm done with that: story-writing all day long. And I'm sure I'll feel better after I do that. :-)

Week 7 Microfictions

Last time I played with some slideshow and animated gif experiments, and this time I tried a Canva experiment. I picked an image for each story, used the transparency tool to fade out the image, and then put the story text on top of the image: pork stew for one story, and a mango tree for the other story. Canva makes it really easy to adjust the transparency of the background image.

In the first story, greedy Anansi uses a disguise to get what he wants: pork stew! More about the story Anansi and the Pork Stew. (There's another story where Anansi's wife is not fooled after all: Anansi and the Chicken Soup.) Click on the image for a larger view; I learned that this wide design is not as good as the tall design for the text size. 

In the second story, Anansi gets fooled as a result of his own greed; he does not get what he wants this time! More about the story Anansi and the Mangoes. (For a story where Anansi does get the mangoes, see Anansi and Tiger's Mango Tree.) Click on the image for a larger view. This tall-not-wide approach is definitely better!

Next time, I'm going to try finding layouts where the text is on a plain background and with just decorative images separate from the text, but I was curious to see how the transparency tool worked in Canvas.