hollywood housewife

turn your instagrams into chatbooks

I've been making photo books. It makes me feel productive. When I discovered chatbooks, I felt like Queen of the family documentary world. It's SO EASY and SO CHEAP.

This is not a sponsored post. I swear. I just can't believe that a project that has been on my list forever (making photo books of all my Instagrams), took a couple of hours and a few bucks and now is done. And each time I fill up a new book's worth of current Instagrams, a new book will automatically come in the mail. Talk about filling a niche in the market!

Here's how it works:

Chatbooks is an app for your phone. Download the app, then sign up for an account. Link it to your Instagram and suddenly ALL your Instagrams appear, in 60-page photo books. If you're like me, that means there will be a LOT of books.

Name your series whatever you want. I think the default was "Laura's Instagrams" or something, but I changed it to The Best Camera Is The One You Have With You, because that's how I feel about phone photography.

You can choose between a few settings, such as whether or not you want to include the captions in your book. I debated about this, since some of the captions really "made" the photo, but ultimately decided it was cleaner just to do the photos.

Then you can go in and delete photos you don't want in the book, and change the covers. You should scroll back and start with book 1, because the books automatically fill to 60 pages, so as you delete photos and make changes, it shifts all the order throughout all the books. So if you start with book 1, you won't have any confusion later. (I know this seems self-evident, but I didn't totally understand how it was working at first and tried to make changes to the latest book instead of the earliest before I realized what the automatic filler was doing. Also, you definitely don't have to order all your Instagrams from all time, so if you're uninterested in starting from scratch, this advice doesn't apply to you. Start wherever you want.)

It's so simple and intuitive to delete, rearrange, and change the covers. I had 22 volumes, so it took me a few hours, but I sat and did it while watching tv and it flew by. You double check that everything looks, how you want, then order. The books are SIX DOLLARS EACH. $6. Each. I'm not even sure how that works, but I couldn't order fast enough. My entire order for all the Instagrams of my life was roughly $122 and they came in under a week. This is a pretty staggering deal.

The best part is that they'll keep coming as you fill up the books. I haven't reached capacity for my next book, but they say they'll email or alert me three days before it ships in case I want to go in and make changes. (And I most assuredly will, the covers are important to me.)

At the price, I was worried that the quality would be bad, but they're not! They're very similar to what I've gotten from all the other photo book places I've tried, a matte finish cover and nice weight to the pages.

Try it out, then come back and thank me later.

frankenstein

The first Read Great Books discussion on Pride & Prejudice went great. Frankenstein is the second book and I'm looking forward to the discussion on Monday, March 16. RSVP here. Check out the full list of books here.

If you want to feel old and unaccomplished, just know that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was just 18. Shelley had been traveling through Europe with friends as a teen, and while in Switzerland had gotten caught up in the occult ideas that were swirling around. The group - which included her lover and future husband Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron - made a bet over who could write the best horror story. Frankenstein and his monster were born.

Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818 when Shelley was just 20. In 1822, it was published in France, this edition bearing the author's name. These first two runs broke the story into three small editions, a common format at the time. In 1831, Shelley heavily revised Frankenstein and they were merged into one volume. From its first appearance, the critical reviews have been mixed, but it has always been popular. Stage show adaptations cropped up immediately, spreading the story throughout Europe.

Mary Godwin Shelley was the product of two radical thinkers. Both writers, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote a manifesto of sexual equality, "A Vindication of the Right of Woman," and her father, William Godwin, was a known political philosopher, churning out justice commentary as well as novels. Mary was born in August of 1797, and her mother died from complications of the birth in September.

William Godwin encouraged his young daughter to take part in the lively conversations around their family table, with noted writers and philosophers. At the age of 11, she wrote and published a children's booklet through her stepmother's newly formed publishing house.

When Mary met the poet Percy Bysse Shelley, he was already married to a woman named Harriet. In spite of this, two years after first meeting, Mary and Percy "eloped," though technically he was still married to Harriet. The new couple spent months traveling Europe, meeting with friends and writing.

The next few years brought a supreme amount of grief. Mary's stepsister Fanny committed suicide, and not long after so did Harriet, Percy's first wife. Harriet's death by drowning left Mary and Percy free to marry, by then they can endured one baby born premature who would not survive, and rejoiced with the birth of one son and later a daughter. By 1820, both of those children had died in separate incidents, and in 1822 Percy drowned while sailing.

Only 25, Mary Shelley had written several novels and was encountered debilitating grief. Her fourth and last child, Percy Florence Shelley, became her reason for living, and though she continued writing for the rest of her life - everything from travel journals to biographies - she never remarried.

There is much more to say about Mary Shelley, but I think it's important to read the book first. We'll be discussing Frankenstein on Monday, March 16. You can RSVP here to the discussion.

Happy reading!

pride & prejudice

Pride & Prejudice is the first pick for the Read Great Books: A Literature Challenge. We'll be discussing it on Monday, February 16. Coming in at around 300 pages (this version is 226 pages, the one I picked up is 323), if you started today you'd need to read about 23 pages a day to finish before we discuss it. (Also, it's free on kindle!)

I chose Pride & Prejudice because I knew that I wanted to include Jane Austen in the list, and this one is probably her most famous. I'm not sure how I escaped reading Austen throughout college - she seems like she would be up my alley - but for some reason I've always been turned off by purely romantic novels. (Gone with the Wind excepted, though that book is hardly "pure romance.")

A little bit about the book:

Pride & Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen set in England and published in 1813. The title term "Pride & Prejudice" originated in a passage about slavery in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776, but Austen probably came across it in Fanny Burney's novel Cecilia, published in 1782, which used the phrase three times in all caps.

Jane Austen wrote Pride & Prejudice between 1796 and 1797, originally calling it First Impressions. After receiving an initial rejection from publishers, she made significant revisions - including changing the title - and didn't make a publishing deal until 1812. Unlike her financial deal with Sense & Sensibility (published in 1811), where she made a commission on every book sold after the publisher's losses, Austen sold Pride & Prejudice for a flat fee of £110. 

There have been numerous movies, plays, and mini-series' based on Pride & Prejudice. The most popular have been the 1940 movie starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, the 1995 BBC series starring Colin Firth, and the 2005 movie starring Keira Knightley.

The original cover verses today's versions have gone through significant transformations. Here's 200 Years of Pride & Prejudice book design. (Some really cool ones there.)

A poll conducted by the BBC in 2003 named Pride & Prejudice "UK's 2nd Best Loved Book" behind The Lord of the Rings. In a 2008 survey of more than 15,000 Australian readers, Pride & Prejudice came in first on a list of the "101 Best Books Ever Written."

We'll be discussing the book here on the blog on Monday, February 16 over HERE. Come join in the conversation!