The wide, wide world of publication

For the past two weeks, I have been holed away in the cave that is the CCS computer lab putting together the collection of short stories from the Short Short Fiction class. With the help of my good friend Britta, who taught me how to use InDesign (and a Mac, for that matter) in just two hours, I began my epic first creation in the world of the books.
I have to say I thought it would be harder, although it probably helped to have someone showing me what to do instead of having to figure the program out by myself, as Britta did years ago. But now that I know how to use InDesign, I'm seriously considering paying the couple hundred dollars to buy the program. It's really, really cool. You can do so much with it and after you're done, printing your book at Kinkos is really, really cheap.
First, I tried out several different fonts (ok, every single one) before deciding with Britta's suggestion on Adobe Caslon Pro. Adobe Caslon Pro is a little old-fashioned, but also looks professional and reads really well on a page. Even in smaller scale, the typeface is readable. That's a sign of a great professional font, to me.
Using a basic mock-up which consisted of a couple blank pieces of paper folded together (another great strategy I picked up from Britta), I decided on using running headers that would print the author's name on the top left and the title of the story on the top right.
After I decided on a style, we set out creating master pages that would keep the style consistent but easy to adhere to when placing the stories. It took some fiddling around, but we figured out that the running headers needed to be placed on the masters and in order to change the running headers for each author's story, the easiest thing to do was to create a new master for every story. A title page master was created separately to exclude running headers on the title pages.
With the name Short Shorts, a wingding pair of scissors seemed oddly fittingly. Placed between the title and its author and the start of the piece, it was a simple way to add extra personality to the journal through the title page.
Once all the pieces were placed, a real feat considering the layout relies on other people to submit electronic versions of their stories in a timely manner, the tiny, tiny things were attended to: putting double spaces between every new sentence, making sure all quotes were curly, not straight and boring, all dashes and hyphens were the same size, all those fun things.
The hardest parts were the imposition of the pages and adjusting the cover so it will come out fine no matter how it is lined up over the bound pages. The imposition we achieved (finally) using InBooklet SE on InDesign. We found that exporting InDesign files is often a little quirky because InDesign has default settings that mess with bleeds and margins of the pages. But after we discovered where and what those were and fixed them, everything came out great. The imposition was doen by printing to a PostScript file, then converting the PS file to a PDF.
The cover was finished mainly through actual size comparisons between the screen and an 8 1/2 x 11 printed copy of the cover. Knowing the cover would be lined up on the back, I formatted the front picture and text using measurements that would account for the spine of the book. I estimated the spine using an example that was an 80 page book. Knowing mine was 60, I guessed and adjusted the cover photo accordingly.
Despite massive printing problems that even my nerdiest friends could not solve, I completed my print-out of my final project at 12:49AM this morning and fell asleep in my niiiice warm cozy bed around 2AM.
The final project looks pretty spiffy, if I do say so myself.
The test copy should be in on Tuesday and I can't wait!

A big thanks to everyone that helped me survive this project