Well, dear readers, here I sit like so much fish, having eaten enough Genghis Cohen food for five people, unable to move and uncomfortable as all get out, and I think we all know how uncomfortable all get out is after a big Chinese meal at Genghis Cohen. The jernt was jumping at six-thirty, I must say, and by seven it was jammed. The occasion was celebrating Sami Staitman’s eighteenth birthday. It’s hard to fathom that we began working together back in 2012 when I put her and her sister in a Kritzerland show for the first time. And since then I’ve continued to work with her, watch her grow and become a wonderful performer. I wrote Welcome to My World for her and despite some rough patches in that rehearsal process the resulting performance was simply amazing for a fifteen-year-old and it garnered her a best actress in a musical nomination from the Robby Awards, putting her in the company of some mighty terrific actresses. Additionally, I cast her in Pure Imagination (the Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse revue I created), Li’l Abner, the concert reading of The Brain from Planet X, and she has done more Kritzerland shows than any other performer.
Dinner was really fun and we had lots o’ laughs and lots o’ food – my beloved extra crispy orange chicken, Kung Pao chicken, green beans, crackerjack shrimp, and Sami had the sizzling rice soup and she and her mom had mooshu chicken. It was a humungous amount of food but we did pretty well by it. I gave Sami some nail polish, which I give her every birthday. She liked this year’s colors very much. We ran into my cousin Mickey Rapkin, too – always nice to see him. As some of you might know, he wrote the book Pitch Perfect. And five hours later, I’m still as full as I was when I got home. Go know.
Prior to that, I’d gotten about nine hours of necessary sleep. Once up and coherent, I continued proofing the book. But I also texted Grant, who was next door, and told him I wanted to come over so we could make a couple of style decisions, because I didn’t want to keep making notes if the style decisions were going to fix certain things. So, over I went and we chatted about it and then we just ended up fixing the stuff where I’d already done a full pass – all the hyphens changed to em dashes (some of them had been, some hadn’t), giving Part One and Part Two their own title pages, fixing some indentation problems, and a few other little things. We decided on a few style things, and put in all of the little *** things wherever I denote a passage of sufficient time, rather than just leave three spaces. That actually added several pages to the book, which right now is 223 pages, without acknowledgements and the little photo gallery we’re still thinking about doing. So, we’ll probably end up at 225 to 227 pages, just right. We worked for about ninety minutes, and because we did all that stuff, if I finish proofing today, then tomorrow we’ll only need about thirty minutes to do the other minor typo and slight adjusting stuff. We do have to wait for the one blurb that will adorn the back cover, and come tomorrow I’ll write the flap copy. That should give us everything we need to send in, and my hope is that by Friday everything can go to the publisher. From that point on, things should move fairly quickly, since I’m part of the “fast track” program.
After that, I went and got Sami’s nail polish gift, came home, got ready and then they came and gathered me up and off we went for our dining adventure. Once home, they came in for a few minutes, then went on her merry way. I was ready to burst, but I just continued proofing. I watched the first episode of a Netflix series called Re: Mind, but it’s pretty bad – it’s actually a Japanese series that Netflix purchased.
Today, I’ll hopefully finish proofing. Then tonight I’m seeing our very own Doug Haverty in a show, and I’m sure we’ll go out after for a quick bite. I have no intention of eating anything prior to that.
Tomorrow I’ll hopefully get with Grant and we’ll put this puppy to bed. As I said, it will probably only take thirty minutes or so to wrap it up, then he’ll send me the final PDF and I’ll take a tour through that just to make sure we got everything. I’ll write the flap copy, too. The rest of the week is meetings and meals, meals and meetings, a viewing of a video, and whatever else needs doing.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, proof, see a show, and have a bite to eat. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, where I shall hopefully at some point not feel this full.