supply & demand

chocolate colors
It's been a pretty calm day for me in spite of it being the beginning of a holiday weekend. There are lots of tourists in town and hundreds of bikers passing through on their way to the Vietnam memorial in Red River - a rumbling three-day parade, complete with do-rags, leather, and boots. This annual run has been going on for many years and attracts huge numbers of bikers. We don't live in town so the noise and traffic aren't a bother. We'll hole up at home with food and wine, books and music, and relax.

relax?
What a concept! I did actually have time to go shoe shopping today, pick up groceries, including organic dark chocolate (they look like M&Ms but aren't). The colors remind me of the sock I'm knitting. At home I settled down with a handful and carefully proofed the pre-press copy of the book. It looks great, but I did find a few nasty little typos that were missed by me and the proofreader. This last part is so exacting and important. There's nothing worse than mistakes in a finished book. It makes me angry when I encounter them in books I'm reading and it makes me want to crawl into a cave if it happens in a book I've edited. Now, if I were an editor at Random House or any other big corporate publisher, I'd have a staff of proofreaders and could order them around, make them do the detail work. I'd just sit behind my big desk and manage (dream on oh great editor and have another purple chocolate).

Deadline looms large, grows heavier each day. Lesley, the designer of the book is leaving for South Africa on Sunday. She'll be gone for more than a month and I don't speak printer lingo. She tells me not to worry. Look for us out at the bridge around midnight tonight.