November is a month of many things. In addition to Thanksgiving, in November we observe Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, National Homeless Youth Awareness Month, November Beard Club and, among many other things, National Novel Writing Month.

Unbeknownst to me I participated in National Novel Writing Month several years ago. I was in the second grade. Each student in our class was tasked with writing, illustrating, and binding a book. At the start, this all seemed like good fun. In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed the project and ended up creating three artful works.

The real chef d’oeuvre was called “Garfield Goes to the Farm.” (Our second grade curriculum had not yet broached copyright, trademarks, and permissions.) It was a ten-page book that portrayed one cat’s exploration of rural America and the emotional tension that resulted.

Needless to say, I was proud of this book—complete with its Happy Birthday wrapping paper binding—and sat eager to share it with the rest of my class on “Share Day”. As I read the book facing the circle so my classmates could see the illustrations, I felt more and more confident that my book would be the favorite—lauded by my teacher and set apart by one, maybe even two, gold stars. The book received applause upon its completion and I fielded a few questions from the audience: Yes, I had drawn the pictures myself without any assistance from an adult. Yes, the Happy Birthday binding was also my idea. No, this was the only copy and not for sale.

I returned to my place in the circle and smugly half-listened to Amber F. read her title, something about going to visit Jamaica. Having never heard of such a place, I decided it was a sci-fi tale and that my victory was in the bag.  

The rest is a blur. I remember a wild uproar from the students when she finished and hearing my teacher repeat something about how she couldn’t believe a child Amber’s age would use an accurate Jamaican dialect both in her writing and reading. I didn’t know what dialect was, but I didn’t like it. This story by Amber F. was longer than mine, had more illustrations than mine, and was more dialecter than mine. I realized “Garfield Goes to the Farm” had lost. It was not the class favorite, and on that day I gave up novel writing forever.

Looking back, I realize I made a classic mistake. One Garfield probably learned on his trip to the farm: I counted my chickens before they hatched. Not to mention, I took on too much for my first novel-writing attempt. Better to focus on one story and perfect it than to attempt three. Also, I had no shortcuts or assistance, which made it more difficult and time-consuming.

The same could be said of creating READ posters, especially if you’re new to the software. Better to get down the basics than try to create READ posters for every teacher in school for your first project.

And although I’ve sworn off novel-writing, I’ve tried my hand at some written instructions that detail an alternate way to extract a reader from his or her background.

[Note: the READ CD video tutorials offered here use the Magic Extractor and will not correspond to the instructions below, which use the Magnetic Lasso Tool.]

Alternate Way to Extract Reader Using Magnetic Lasso

1. Open the picture of your favorite reader in Adbbe Photoshop Elements
2. Select the Lasso Tool from the toolbar on the left side of Elements. It is the 6^th selection down and looks like a small lasso.
3. There are 3 kinds of Lasso Tools (found on the top of the Elements work station below the icons for Print, Save, etc), so make sure you select the Magnetic Lasso, which has a small u-shaped magnet over the lasso as an icon. When you place the cursor over the icon it will read: Magnetic Lasso Tool.
4.  With the Magnetic Lasso Tool, click somewhere on the outline of your reader and trace around the reader. If there is a spot where the background and foreground is nearly the same color, you can click to specifically select where you want the outline to go, otherwise it should easily trace. When you have returned to where you first started, a small (very small!) circle will appear on the Magnetic Lasso icon, showing you’ve returned to the start. Click once and a dotted line will appear.
5. If the selection is not perfect you can add to the selection by holding Shift and tracing the part you want to add. To remove a selection from the image, hold down Alt and trace the part you want to remove.
6. Once you have your reader outlined, open up the READ background you want to insert your reader into.
7. Using the Move Tool (first tool on the left side toolbar) click and drag your reader’s image (the cursor should be solid black)  over to the READ background. It should drop into place where you can then adjust the size by holding Shift (to ensure the proportions stay the same) and using the corner arrows and dragging.