Baking Chez Moi: Touch Typing for Real

When I tell people that I’ve got a new cookbook coming out, lots of them have the same response:  How do you write so quickly?

Here’s the answer:  I don’t write quickly.  Not at all.  I am the proverbial slowpoke.  And while it might seem like just yesterday that my last book, Around My French Table, hit the stores, it was four years ago.  And it was four years before that that Baking From My Home To Yours was born.

I’m anything but quick.

But in cookbookery, as Julia Child used to call our craft, there’s much to do before you even write the first word.  Between making an outline detailing all the recipes you’d love to include and turning in your manuscript, there are thousands of hours in the kitchen, lots of happy successes and some sad failures too.  Baking Chez Moi will not include Marie's Almond Cake, the cake I made about a dozen times (and would have had to call Twelve’s The Charm) and thought I’d nailed, only to do the one-more-time-just-to-be-sure test and discover that it still wasn’t perfect (and – surprise! – by that time, I’d decided I didn’t love the cake as much as I thought I had). 

I’ll tell you more about how I develop and test recipes, but for now, take a look at my keyboard.  No matter what kind of computer I’ve used, at the end of a book project I’ve always worn off a few keys.  But this time I’m missing a, e, s, f, c, v, p, m, n, and part of h.  In fact, there’s an indentation in the c key that’s so deep it could rightly be called a hole.

My husband says he can always tell when I’m nearing the end of a book project by looking at my keyboard.  Moi? I can tell by looking at the pages as they pile up.  Few things are prettier.  If you write, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

via:http://doriegreenspan.com/2014/04/-0-0-1-253.html