Had a little bit of a rough night of poor sleep due to tummy troubles — I’m not sure what set those off, possibly greed. I’d made a really nice pork curry, tamarind-tangy and slow simmered with coconut milk yesterday afternoon, and couldn’t resist having some….even though I KNEW I had an event to go to yesterday evening, and there would be yummy food there. The event wasn’t a dinner, but the appetizers were delicious and substantial and I think in the end, I probably had two dinners’ worth of food last night, so it’s perhaps not so surprising that I had a restless night. Ye shall reap what you sow…
The event was a reception honoring retiring Clerk of the Board, Gail Kalmerton, and I’ll just take this moment to say that it’s been a real delight working with Gail this year, and she will be sorely missed — she’s incredibly knowledgeable and competent, and having seen OPRF through many different boards, I’m quite sure that she’s done a tremendous amount to help keep newbie board members learning the ropes on the right side of the appropriate legal lines. WWGD — when I’m not sure whether something is appropriate for closed session or needs to be discussed in open session for public view, I’ll be thinking, What Would Gail Do?
(Luckily, I have her cell phone number, if I need to text with an urgent question. I will try very hard not to use it. 
)
I did get up and set right to work today, which I’m pleased about — last night I copied over the undone tasks to a new to-do list, which was waiting on the kitchen island for me, a good prompt to dive right in. I did the hardest task first, proofing Vegan Serendib.
I didn’t proof the whole book in the end — just the front and back matter, which was remarkably clean, because my editor, Stephanie Bailey, is a goddess of meticulous work. I don’t think I need to do another pass on every single recipe, especially since we’re printing this as POD (print-on-demand) — if we do catch an error, we can easily fix that going forward, as opposed to having 2000 copies in a warehouse, each with errors that can’t be corrected…
There’s one more task I want to do before we order the next set of galleys (why more galleys? See next post), which is going through the recipes and checking the photos. I’m not sure I’m thrilled with every single photo. Some of it is just the classic ‘brown food’ problem — some of the most delicious food is basically a brown stew, and it is very challenging to photograph that well! But some of them, I suspect I can do better. I don’t want to slow down production with me taking the time to re-make dozens of recipes, just so I can marginally improve the photos, but maybe just a few? We’ll see.
It’s getting real, people. Soon, BOOK. Thank you to all the pre-order & Kickstarter folks for your patience; I’m pretty sure you’ll be happy with the slightly delayed result. It’ll be beautiful!
