Finished!

This time, I mean finished with the copy-edited ms, except I want to go through it once more tonight and look at certain specific things. It’ll only take me one evening unless I forgot to note page numbers. I would certainly prefer not to look at every page. I will DEFINITELY not be reading every word.

What this particular copy-edited ms has demonstrated for me is:

1) My hindbrain does not get the difference between “that” and “which”, even though I thought I had it trained properly by now.

2) And apparently I have a deep conviction that the word “half” should be connected to whatever follows it by a hyphen.

Apparently my eye just reads right over these items, even when I think I am paying attention. Kind of embarrassing! On the other hand, I found and fixed at least half a dozen typos the copy editor missed, so Go, me!

I think I had better start using the FIND command to check “half” as part of polishing a new manuscript. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a way to search only for those instances of “which” that lack a comma in front of them.

Okay! In other news! The most popular desserts last night were:

1) The apple cake, even though I warned people up front about the cayenne. Everybody tried a small piece and nearly everybody loved it. I will post the recipe sometime this week.

2) The cheesecake. The rosewater didn’t come through as strongly as I’d hoped; I should have used a full Tbsp instead of two tsp. But it was popular anyway because hey, cheesecake.

3) The peach pie, which unexpectedly appeared in my kitchen — Mom was baking, too — so I didn’t make the brownies.

The least popular? The chocolate chip toffee cookies. Isn’t that interesting? The only dessert with chocolate AND the most familiar dessert AND the one with the smallest portions, and everybody dissed it. The rest of the cookies are now in the freezer and I will gradually eat them all myself, which is not a sacrifice.