Paying up the insurance premiums – just in case

One of the things we wanted to do for our appearance at the Tucson Festival of Books was to have sample chapters of our latest — but not quite ready to publish — newest books. We put the covers up last week. Here are the flats – so gorgeous.

Anyway, we wanted these booklets. We had like a month to get it done. Immediately, we cleaned up our pages and contacted our favorite editor. She said she had time and we sent them right over. Then our cover artist agreed to get us stuff right away. Editing always takes longer than you plan. The artist’s entire family came down with the flu.

Everything seemed to take longer. I started pricing out the cost of printing and we almost had a heart attack.  To get 125 printed would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $420.

So of course we decided we could put them together ourselves.

On Saturday two very sick and pitiful Sisters spent three hours printing 3,500 pages – including color covers. We tortured poor Jacob at the printing company the entire time. First off, Ava insisted on calling him Tristan for a reason I still can’t fathom. There was another fellow copying an entire text-book who spent at least an hour silently laughing and shaking his head at us. We’re pretty sure that Tristan/Jacob quit after we left.

We were delighted as hell to find a paper-folding machine at work. I bought a special stapler that will staple in the middle of the page. After work on Monday, we were going to stay and fold all 250 of them and staple them together. Then VOILA – we’d be done.

Promptly at 5:30 we hauled in a box of booklets and stood in front of the machine. There were no instructions, but a lot of dials and levers and adjustments that could be made. We tried some sample pages and it never worked out right. What it did do, however, was scare the living hell out of us. There may have been screaming. A scary roller ball grabs

It looks innocuous but it’s a Stephen King-like machine that wants to eat your fingers

the paper and whips it through the folder mechanism at approximately 95 miles per hour while simultaneously making an excessively loud BANG! noise. This is seriously not a machine you want to get your fingers or hair caught up in. Neither of the Sisters are especially trustworthy in this regard. I once got my long hair caught in a paper shredder and Ava stuck her fingers in a moving blender. There is family history of digit loss.

I went back to my office and pulled up the manual on the internet. I watched a YouTube tutorial and learned absolutely nothing. I could hear Ava in the copier room messing with the thing. You could hear the BANG all the way down the hall. Even if we could figure out how to get the fold in the right place, there was no way we’d be able to use the machine during lunch. Any one of the people in the offices surrounding the copier room would come in and kick our ass after 10 minutes of that BANGING!

Eventually we deciphered the instructions and got to work in the slowest possible assembly line ever seen. Lucy and Ethel ate a hell of a lot more chocolate than we managed to fold booklets. It was ridiculous. We’d be there forever. Ava and I decided we could fold them this slowly at home in front of the television with a LOT less BANGING!

Mine are finished. All 250 of them stapled together. Of course I can’t use my right arm anymore. Ava thinks we need to move around more, but I’m not sure what exercise prepares you for making 500 staples.

Anyway – if you’re going to be at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend, come get a free sample of our next books. We’ll give it to you with all 10 fingers and a very sore arm.