Saturday, March 8, 2008

Cook Book Editor…whoaaa……

This is the hardest thing I ever do for the Daycare my kids attended to. And might be the biggest project I ever got from them –the Daycare Centre Management-. Being a cooking book editor. Yap. Huge task...

What happen is, this centre had accepted one of their casual staff project to collecting recipes from parents and staffs, and turn into a-supposed to be- cooking book. The writer –or I might say the compiler- need this book as her project to pass one of her college assignment. Once the book was ready, and handed to Centre Director, it put her in disbelief. Not because this recipes compilation was very sophisticated, in fact the opposite. Not to mention some fatal typing mistake.

That the short story from the director about the book.

I, being one of the parent who handed my recipes, also furious with the result she taking care of my recipe. I deliberately gave her permission to take as many recipes as she needed from my kitchen-blog, and she turned my recipes into disaster. One of the recipe printed on this book even had the picture & title with no correlation to the recipe itself. I did not understand, is it that hard to just copy-and-paste, and yet the compiler apparently did not do check and re-check.

So, that is my short story about this cooking book.

And also, I want to save my face from further embarrassing moment. My name clearly stated below my recipes. Imagine when parents get the copy, they read this sushi recipe title without the recipe under it – instead of sushi; it is a tip about how to make your own stock-. This will make me look like a moron trying to cook.

Once I got the hard copy, I tried to sit down with post-stick-notes and made some notes. It turned out that I had to edit every single recipe on this book! There are 32 recipes, and not only small mistake like kind of typing or spelling incorrectly –I was wondering if she ever know about spell checker and grammar checker in MS Word- but also fatal misguide. Just imagine that you have to add one vital ingredient when you half way cooking that that ingredient doesn’t listed on the ingredient list so no way on earth you have that ready to add. Perfecto.

3 days on, I’ve been sitting on Uni Coffee Shop for about 3 hours every morning, and I felt stuck. I felt like I’m not making any progress. Still another 20 recipes plus 4 desserts need to check –and edit- and the more I flip the book’s page, the more I found the problem.

I start to think, word “Editor” that was sound so great and glamorous, just loosing its bling now. Not because it’s unpaid job, just purely frustrating. I know the only way to break my frustrating feeling is to switch my span of attention to another thing. Like reading…a cook book.

*sigh…*

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