"Now what?" is what I'm thinking. We submitted our cookbook proposal on monday and are waiting for feedback. I don't know what I was expecting- maybe in my deepest heart I was hoping for an instantaneous "We love it! Of course we'll publish it!". I know very well that things are rarely that easy. It's usually a struggle, and a "journey" with important lessons learned along the way. My problem has always been that I give up when the going gets tough, or more accurately, boring. The fear that I'm a lightweight, a dilettante plays in the back of my head. I realized pretty recently that in order to do anything really worthwhile, you really have to work at. It all takes diligence; relationships, parenting, cooking, baking, writing, being an upstanding individual, fill in the blank- it all takes effort to be better than average and OK.
To be honest, I think the proposal and "conceptual" part of the process is actually the easy part. Testing the recipes until they're perfect is the hard part- the tedious part. Writing the segues to each recipe- so that it's real and not hackneyed and corny, is the hard part.
What I hope to do through the cookbook is to show a way to celebrate every part of life from the mundane to the sacred. Family, friends, good food, good music, good conversation is what makes it all worthwhile: the dissappointments, the boredom, the struggle. It's a Celebrationist Handbook. I'm not sure if I have the ability and skills to pull it off- but I need to try at least.