Monday, April 14, 2014

Baking Chez Moi: Cut, paste, repeat - how to organize chapters

I'm packing up the bits, pieces and early drafts of Baking Chez MoiRecipes From My Paris Home to Your Home Anywhere, my newest book, and, looking at the piles of paper and the scribbles, marveling (as I have for each of my other books) that this stuff ever comes together.  I work in notebooks - I'll tell you more about them at some point -- and then write the recipes and make a computer file for each chapter.  As I'm working, I make a bunch of charts and to-do lists and spreadsheets and notes and I think I'm the most organized I've ever been.  Then the time comes to arrange the recipes in each chapter in some kind of order.  And that's when confusion sets in ... again.
This year, Mary Dodd, who works with me (and who was a card-carrying member of Tuesdays with Dorie - that's how I met her), turned organizing the recipes into an art project.  She created long strips of paper for each chapter and small cards for each recipe and she put double-sided tape on each card.  We pasted and moved things around and around and I lived with the strips up on the wall for a while until it was final.
I'm not sure that the colored strips are any more useful than a spreadsheet, but they're so much prettier and lots more fun.  Merci, Mary.
And, just in case you didn't see it, and because I'm so excited about it, here's the cover of the new baby:
via:http://doriegreenspan.com/2014/03/baking-chez-moi-cut-paste-repeat---how-to-organize-chapters.html

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