Teamwork

We launched Jenn's new website today in preparation for her next book, "A Visit From Krampus," which lands this Friday in time for CatFest 2026.

This is Jenn's, er, Newton's second book of poetry, an homage to "A Visit from St. Nicholas," not so coincidentally just in time for holiday gift shopping.

We came up with a plan many months ago and decided it would be really cool to do custom linocut illustrations. Enter Jenn's big sister, colleen regin, who takes to artistic challenges like a beaver to a dam. A methodical artistic assassin who, at times I'm sure, thought there was no way in hell this would come together by the deadline. It did. She even beat it by a week.

The timeline was insane.

Then came Mark and the entire team at Print Three here in Calgary, who priced it out, found the paper, scoped the build, and printed the book plus six custom Holiday Greeting Cards and a six-card gift pack with art pulled right from its pages. All with envelopes and a cool plastic sleeve.

Giving myself some props: I set Make More Creative up as an imprint of MD&A INC. with Library and Archives Canada, got a spiffy new ISBN, made a bar code, laid out and designed the book, did the same for the cards, added a bookmark for good measure, managed the whole dealio, and created a custom ecommerce site better than Shopify — or, as we like to say, "SHOW-PIFFY."

Why did all of this come together? Because it's a really great book that Jenn, er, Newton, wrote, and because seeing her and her sister Colleen work on a creative project together was incredible to experience.

And nothing, I mean nothing, beats holding something in your hands that you helped breathe life into. You can get your own copy, or get your Holiday shopping done early, at JenniferMacLean.ca.

Great job, everyone.

(The doodle of the day is from the illustrations I did for Jenn's, uh, Newton's first book, "An Ode To Myself.")