Final stretch

Plan for today: first, submit my votes for a thing I agreed to jury for — this one is quick, but I am increasingly convinced that such jury work should come with honoraria, so one of my priorities for 2018 is figuring out how to offer those to all the SLF jurors. Somehow — I hate to take away money that would otherwise go to awards, though. Well, just have to figure out how to raise more money for the SLF. Thinking. I suspect what I really need is a fundraising committee. Help?

Then, I have a theoretically open morning. I’m planning to spend half an hour pruning the parkway strip, which is full of flowers but also full of dead bits after enduring the last two weeks of construction. It’ll be nice when the street is repaved, but my plants are taking a bit of a beating. I think they’re mostly going to survive, though. I also have a few pansies to add to my fall planter, and a Japanese anemone to get in the ground — this is the THIRD year I’m trying to plant one, and I am crossing my fingers that this one actually lives. I think assiduous watering is probably key. Please picture me out there three times a day with my little watering can.

And then, I think work on the cookbook formatting. I’m sorry I don’t have a pre-order page up yet — I don’t think I can ask Steve Berman at Lethe to set a price until he knows how many pages the book will be, and he can’t do that until his layout guy does the layout, and the layout guy can’t do the layout until I give him the final text, so I’m the hold-up here.

I think I do want to add three more recipes (lamb curry, goat curry, and beet salad), which I’m planning to knock out in the next week, but mostly it’s going through and getting all the text consistent, deciding how much extra material to include, such as little stories or quotes, etc.

I think it may make the most sense to do three editions, actually — the stripped down trade paperback edition, with just the recipes, no photos, and the e-book and glossy hardback; the e-book full of photos (and included with purchase of either print book), the hardback with some photos, and both of those with some additional bits of story / memoir. I’m going to dedicate next week to getting this done — the goal is to hand it off to Steve by 10/7. (Steve, maybe we can get your designer to block off some time for the week following, so we can get the page counts and the pre-order page up ASAP?)

At lunchtime today, though, I’m going to knock off, because my college roommate Kirsten is coming into town, and I’m going to go pick her up at the airport and hang out. Man does not live by cookbook alone.

3 thoughts on “Final stretch”

  1. Mary Anne Mohanraj

    Arts jurors often don’t have academic jobs, so aren’t being ‘paid’ in professional credit. When I juried for the State of Wisconsin grants, they paid me a nice honorarium.

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