blurbs and books of love

There is company I love called blurb and I feel the need to tell you about it. My friend Lauren first introduced me to it a few years ago and now I'm hooked.

I've used both snapfish and shutterfly before to make a custom photo album (we had one made for our wedding guest book) and they can't compare to the quality you get with blurb books... for the same prices!!  (we made photo books for our parents with wedding pictures and they look better than some professional albums we've seen)

Its a small company and they don't just do photo albums - they do novels, cookbooks, children's books, even mini instagram flip books! Its like a tiny independent printing press.

And the best part is that you can create something and then make it public for others to purchase.... so if you have a stack of family photos and recipes you want to scan and preserve you can do it - then the whole clan can log on to buy it for christmas! (am I the only one blown away by this? its awesome right?) You can also search the site for other people's items, often they have ones sold for charity, and buy them as well.

Its really easy to use - I know because I've written several books with blurb (not necessarily good books but they are books none the less, my friends)

When Neil and I had been dating a year we set the gift limit to $1. Around that time I was encouraged by the concussion professionals to journal or write and keep jogging my memory (also a reason for this blog, by the way). In attempt to both work on my brain and seduce my man, I wrote a book about our year together. I wasn't doing well with chronological order so instead I put it in alphabetical categories. It was an encyclopedia of sorts. My Abilities, our Beliefs, his Characteristics, etc, etc, all the way to Vacations. In a used book store, I found an old, worn book for $1 and pasted the typed pages inside.

When we were dating for two years I felt the desire to continue. Both because I still had a huge crush on him and because we were engaged to be married. So I took that computer file from year one and the new book from year two and converted them into Blurb... easy peasy!

I was so happy with the quality, in year three I continued the pattern and the books got longer - that one being 152 pages. (note: I'm not scrapbooker and I don't make photo albums so I slip in a number of pictures here and there for posterity - which pads the stats, page wise)

The best part about Blurb - a paperback, Orbin original, will only set you back $6.95!!! Granted, my books are only for sale to one guy but the point is still the same, you've got a good deal here.

Moving on from my glowing endorsement for just a second, I have to share that our 2 year wedding anniversary is coming up in about a month and the deadline of Aug 22nd is looming ahead because now it comes with the pressure of completing a novel. I'm happy to do it because I still have that huge crush, but I'm a mere 14 pages into our 4th edition! 

Question: is it cheating to copy and paste parts of an irreverent blog into a book of gushing love and adoration?