A couple years ago Kyle Cassidy paired people up on his blog to work together on something creative. After everyone was partnered up Kyle said ‘Now go and make beautiful things!’. Being the brat that I am, I immediately knew I wanted to do a project titled ‘Something Beautiful’. Luckily for me my partner, Sarah, is also a bit of a brat -and- is into photography.

Things clicked into place for us well at the beginning, but then life stepped in and what was meant to be a 30 day project actually took us more like two years. However, it’s my pleasure to announce that Something Beautiful is finished and ready for release. Whoot!

What is Something Beautiful? I’m so glad you asked 🙂

Sarah sent me a bunch of portraits and I used them to inspire micro-fiction stories. She added my words to her portraits, using the image as a canvas for the words (clever, eh? That was her idea, not mine). We ran into some technical problems though, which meant that only a few of the images have the stories on them — most have them ‘on the side’ (like gravy. Gravy makes good things better, right?). The point is, you get her portraiture photography which is meant to show the beauty in people regardless of size or shape, combined with my, rather dark, micro-fiction. Yay!

Sarah and I agreed that we didn’t want to make any money off this project, but wanted to use it to help others. That means all proceeds from book sales will be donated to the National Eating Disorder Information Centre (http://www.nedic.ca) which works to educate people about eating disorders, body-issues and self-esteem. Helping people see the beauty in themselves and those around them.

You can pick up a copy of Something Beautiful below:

Something Beautiful in downloadable .pdf – $3.50
Something Beautiful in paperback – $14.99

But wait! There’s more!

Sarah and I have discounted the books, 10% off the base cost which means right now you can pick them up for $3.14 and $13.49. What’s more, if you use the coupon code JULYBOOKS11 you should get another 20% off, up to $25. There are savings all around, with all the profits going to a good cause.

Lastly, I would like to thank Kyle for starting the ball rolling on this probject. I never would have met Sarah if it hadn’t been for his blog, and certainly never would have created this book. It was an adventure and I learned a lot over the course of this project’s completion.

Kyle also started the 2xCreative community on Livejournal which is dedicated to collaborative projects. It’s been pretty quiet over there for the last little while, but I’ve participated in a couple pairings there in the past and really enjoyed them. Perhaps, now that Something Beautiful has been released out into the wild, it’s time for me to drop by and stir things up a bit. I hope to see you there.