hmmmm….

It’s gotten to be that inevitable point in late winter when I am more or less living on green cabbage because produce has gotten so expensive. 🙁 (although this year, I’ve also been eating a lot of grapes and cantaloupe from Chile, which for some reason are always on special. Cantaloupe in February…I’m definitely going to hell. 🙁 ) I had exactly the same cabbage-pepper-cheddar cheese mess for the last three days in a row. Today I decided to grate up a quarter-head into slaw. I had a coupon for Ken’s salad dressing, and I only buy fat-free dressing, so I’m limited to the varieties that come in that version. I decided to try a new one: “raspberry pecan.” I thought it might make a nice slaw dressing.

It is indeed a winning combo. Yum!

Sure is a good thing I like cabbage (and all its relatives) so much! Must be all my German, Irish and Welsh genes!

I’m editing the novel. This is the third edit, and it’s turned into a bigger job than I expected, because I’m cutting a lot out. I want to do all of that I can before it goes into the typesetting program, because once the MS is typeset, it’s a total bear to make anything but the most minor changes. Last night I was poking unhappily again at a long, and one would think, critical scene, that I still just hated. I’d tweaked it and tweaked it and it just wouldn’t “play,” and it made the overall energy flow of the narrative awkward. I finally deleted the whole thing, plus all references to it later on. I zapped about 2000 words in one swoop! Now I’m looking at an entire chapter I wrote as I was finally getting the ending done, and I’m thinking seriously that as much as I like the scenes between these two characters, it really doesn’t advance the narrative, and it needs to be zapped. And I’ve been yanking out all kinds of redundancies, cutting paragraphs in half, etc…the book is still going to be long. That only bothers me because it’s going to cost more to print, and therefore I’ll have to set the cover price accordingly. That’s a tricky balance.

I got a shiny brochure from a printing company in Ohio called BookMasters, with a postcard to request a printing quote. I might request a quote, just to see how they compare with LSI. LSI is a sort of default choice because they get you into the Ingram data base, but IF I get pre-pub reviews, and IF advance sales are subsequently high, I might go with an offset run instead of starting out digital, and if I’m doing that, I need to compare quotes.

Whew, this is all hard work.