Monday, February 04, 2019

How I Spent My super Bowl Sunday or What's going on with The Emoji Haggadah?


Thank you to the many of you who've asked. Wanna hear a super-condensed story?:

Before we headed off for our London/Amsterdam vacation, I made sure that any pending book edit was done, sent, not in the back of my mind, and the publisher wasn't expecting anything from me. As I stepped on the plane, I got the news that we're going to print. In my daydreams, I'd be returning to a different life, with all different kinds of new opportunities, positivities, book sales, and shangri-la.

Five days in, I get the following e-mail (highly, seriously, magnificently shortened version):

Pub: "Printed; problem."
Me: "!"
Pub: "...how you put the manuscript together doesn't render...yada yada yada...stand behind product...blah blah blah...need you to redo...yakkety-yak...do it like so, this plug-in, that emoji keyboard, this font, this size...something something something...need in 10 days lechatichila, 11 bidieved."
Me: "?"
Pub: "Hello?"
Me: "Na'aseh v'nishma."

But I was overseas, and had zero access to all these doodads on any device available. I had to wait until I was home, and had 7 days left, to begin testing.

Once home, it took a day to organize with the graphic desinger how this was all supposed to be done.

6 days left.

I spent nearly every waking minute editing, recreating the entire manuscript, from scratch, emoji by emoji, with a set that had 1,500 fewer characters than the original set, forcing me to be re-creative, which takes up a lot of head-room.

I lost a full day because I couldn't get a heter to be mechallel Shabbos.

I spent 6 hours Motzei Shabbos doing nothing but.

Shluffy: 1:15 AM.

Wakey: 6:15 AM. Got right to work, not stopping (save for a 40-minute break at 11 AM to daven/shower/breakfast/coffee and a 10-minute break at 2 PM to fix some lunch) until 7:15 PM, having completely recreated - in 6 days, ahead of lechatichila deadline - what had taken me two years to compile.

I then was finally able to watch the Super Bowl. I jumped in when it was 0-0 with 7:59 left in the 2nd. I heard the commercials sucked anyway.

My wife, God bless her, accommodated me in a million different ways, and created the space for me to put in this 13 hours of work. Thank you, Naomi.

Now I have, multiple times, run for 12 hours straight, but I have to put this feat of endurance up there alongside those. It's not the same physically, but I say it's the same mentally. You just gotta keep going, especially if you want something badly.

So *now* we're going to print, and here's my new cover! Coming to a book store near you!


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