Publishing Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day

British Inquiry

2006-03-20T08:09:00.000-08:00

Time does fly when one is having fun. Much progress has been made since the last entry. The writer’s bibles, “Writer’s Handbook” and the “Writer’s and Artists Year Book” have been put to good use.

Based on these two reference books, I called all of the British publishers that indicated an interest in food titles to find out how their proposal submission process works. There were very few who indicated an “agents only” submissions process, Hodder Headline and Dorling Kindersley being two of these.

I identified nine mid-sized UK publishers or imprints who indicated an interest in food related titles. British publishing is a professional business! Phones get answered within rings by a person! I spoke with the person to whom I submitted my proposal in the majority of cases.

For the larger publishers about half accepted submissions via email – two replied in less than two weeks with thoughtful declining notes. They included suggestions regarding other potentially interesting publishers and specific imprints within the larger publishers. Imprints do have specific mandates for their business but being a little smaller, they may have more degrees of freedom regarding the type of material they consider. I will call to follow up this week on two other email submissions. There are also two hard copy submissions that I will leave for another couple of weeks.

I identified ten smaller publishers who have a potential interest in food related titles. Five of these publishers accepted an electronic submission. Two wrote back immediately to thank me for the proposal, to say that they have a Spanish food title on the way for this year. This is a good sign! A third considered the proposal and within two weeks wrote to suggested that it was not quite a fit for their list. This week I will follow up with the remaining electronic proposals. There is hard copy proposal that will take a little bit more time.

Throughout this process I continue to look for indications regarding how the book is being seen by editors. Comments have suggested that the writing and subject are interesting and of publishable quality. In one case, ananalogy was made between the book’s structure and that of a recipe, with each chapter forming part of the overall recipe. Elsewhere it was suggested that the book is more akin to a best selling health title (as opposed to food) – such as French Women Don’t Get Fat.

I find myself hesitating before sending the proposal to two very well respected British cookbook publishers – Grub Street Press – whose mission includes helping people enjoy food and eat better, and Kyle Cathie - the prestigious publishers of glossy cookbooks, presumably for those who buy a lot of cookbooks. Can Slim Spaniards find a place in such publishers, if in my humble opinion it is produced as an intimate book for people who are:

- Worried about the place of food in their lives
- Interested about Spain because of the way people live and eat there.
- Willing to go onto the internet to find inspiring pictures of the recipes they want to try

Grub Street has set a visionary mandate for itself – to change the way people eat. Perhaps they would be interested in the fact that whereas in the UK, forty percent of household spending on food is for prepared food (imagine more than the grocery cart filled with plastic and high gloss cardboard), in Spain the figure is less than one tenth the UK's at three percent (imagine a shopping cart with one item of prepared food very occasionally). Maybe this week, I will screw up my courage and send the editor of Grub Street a proposal.

Throughout all this I am waiting on replies from two very large North American publishers. Both acknowledged the submission very quickly and have yet to reply definitely. As the optimist one has to be to be undertaking this process, I take this delay as a good sign.

I hear through friends that the Spanish Ambassador continues to ask about Slim Spaniards. I would love to be able to call with good news soon. We could have a bash and invite Pepito.

Music's up!

2006-02-14T08:55:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, that took a long time. Apologies for taking way too long to get an MP3 file uploaded onto the site. I am sorry about this but am all the more pleased by the fact that “Colombiana” one of my favourite songs is now available for you to click on and listen to. The lyrics will be up in Spanish and English in the coming days for anyone who wants to read along while they are listening.

www.slimspaniards.com/index.php/pages/the-smoked-paprika-cafe

No news yet from my proposals but I will keep the blog readers posted as soon as I hear anything. It is a slow process as one would expect.

I will be rotating the quotations on the homepage of www.slimspaniards.com . Have a look today for a new review. If have a view on the book that you would like to share, please sent it along to me and it will be posted as well without reference to your name.

If you have been thinking of making truffles for your beloved, try rolling them in a combination of 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder with ½ teaspoon of hot Spanish Pimentón or Cayenne Pepper. The effect is wonderful, I tried it last night.

That is all for now. Happy Valentines!

The Business of Publishing

2006-02-09T06:50:00.000-08:00

My best self is almost back so I am celebrating with an entry to this blog!

A wonderful person at a large publishing company has become a coach – she has taken the time to read my proposal and to provide fast and extremely helpful feedback. I met her through another wonderful woman who generously took the time to dig up contact details and send them to me. Through this chain of generosity, I have arrived at a place where my proposal to a larger publisher is quite solid.

The proposal contains material that you would expect to find in a document destined to convince someone to invest in a project of this type:

- An analysis of the market including factors that will work in favour of the book
- An analysis of the risks presented by the project including plans to address these risks
- A proposed go to market strategy that describes how publishing the book in the US and the UK would be connect to publishing the book in Spain and elsewhere in Europe
- A brief on why I am the best person to write this book
- An analysis of the manuscript – what is written and what remains to be written
- A sample of the prose – I included Chapters 6 and 4. I decided to include chapter 6 first because I believe it is the best example of a personal narrative that is highlighted by more general references. I included chapter 4 because it contains such interesting historical references that I believe reinforce the timelessness of the book overall
- A sample of recipes

The coach who has helped me make the proposal just that much better, made one important suggestion. She recommended the inclusion of quotes from people who have read the manuscript to date. I made this addition and feel that the proposal has a lively and engaging quality that will result in progress either with this publisher or another for whom this project may be a better fit.

This progress makes up for the proposal that I sent out in December and for whom I have received zero feedback despite countless attempts to engage in the most brief of conversations. I understand the editor I am trying to speak with is very busy with a thesaurus. Perhaps this would not have been the best place for me.

The key is to have confidence and to keep digging. Who knows, maybe the Spring will be when I get to speak to an editor.

In the mean time, I continue to lay the ground work for the process of reconstructing the book into the Six Times a Day structure. I have identified eight heading under which to classify the 30,000 or so words of prose. These are:

1. Spain: General society
2. Spain: Medieval history and Modern History
3. Spain: Twentieth Century history
4. Nutrition and health
5. Eating principles
6. Ingredient profiles
7. Personal anecdotes: poignant
8. Personal anecdotes: funny

My objective is to reconsider this prose as material to frame the personal narrative based on a day and the six eating occasions.

Today I created a new section on the web site called The Smoked Paprika Café. I started to upload MP3 files of my father-in-law singing but ran into a technical glitch with my web software. Hopefully that will be solved later today. Apologies for the long delay in getting this done.

Thank you for reading this blog, and as always, if the spirit moves you, let me know what you think.

Erratum

2006-01-19T06:02:00.000-08:00

The "squid went skidding" of the counter top as I prepared it for my father-in-law’s medieval recipe.

Spaniards elect healthy and hearty "mid-morning breakfast smacks"…or rather snacks.

These are but two of the many errors that have been found during the detailed copy editing process that is underway for Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day.

Jane and Paulette are lovingly going through the manuscript and the website and fixing hundreds of those little things that I seem incapable of seeing.

At the same time, I used the past 5 weeks to think hard about Slim Spaniards and to reconsider its structure entirely. The current framework for the book is thematic based on my experiences and observations of life in Spain and then backed up with both anecdotes and research.

This structure is functional – in that it helps to organize the information, but I have felt for some time that it made it difficult for me to integrate the personal and funny elements that I believe are tremendously important to reader’s experience of this book.

If you have been reading previous entries to this blog and have had a look at www.slimspaniards.com, you know that this book is not being written as a cookbook but rather as a cross between food anthropology and a family food biography, which also contains recipes.

After much thought, I will soon embark on the process of restructuring the book so that its content (narrative, recipes etc...) flows through the course of a day.

I will use the "six times a day" as a way to introduce the people such my family and friends and with them, introduce recipes, songs and funny stories.

From this microcosm, I will bring in both supporting and dissenting views from Spanish society and from history both recent and much less so.

I am excited about this new way forward, and feel it will enable me to make the book a more intimate and engaging experience for the reader.

My hope is that the reader will enjoy feeling that through food we connect to others at many levels.

Through reconsidering the place of food in our lives, we connected one family in North America and Spain and to Spanish society more generally.

Through ways we may never have imagined, we connected to others through hundreds of years of history, religion and again through food.

This feeling of connection is what I most seek to accomplish.

In future entry to this blog, I will touch on why making these connections is so important to me in a world of podcasting and customization of so much of the media we interact with.

For now I will say, that during many years traveling constantly for my work, I craved this feeling of connection.

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On an entirely different note, I must also let you know that over the past number of weeks, a number of stumbling blocks have made it very difficult for me to continue writing work on Slim Spaniards.

These difficulties have also forced me to stop communicating through this blog. I am saddened by this. It is plain to me, that none of this work can be done unless with “my best self”.

Hopefully, I will have “my best self” back very soon and will move from thinking intensely about this project, to sitting down and writing.

Again, thanks for reading. If the spirit moves you, do let me know what you think.

The Singular Importance of Design

2005-12-20T07:35:00.000-08:00

This week the tremendous importance of design was confirmed once again. Malcolm Gladwell is right about Blink.

Some weeks ago I met with a book designer who kindly gave me some of his time to speak about publishing in Canada. I brought one of the Slim Spaniards cards to offer him. The card contains words that describe the book and that explain that I am looking to publish this book in a number of countries. The card is in the form of a post-card. It contains the book’s logo – a Miro-esque woman, who appears to be dancing and whose form would suggest she enjoys the pleasures of life.

I handed this post-card to the Book Designer, who turned it around, looking at it from side to side and who then very generously offered an introduction to a respected Canadian publisher with whom he has worked for a number of years. He had not read any writing from the book but said in an understated way – “Everything about this card is very nice”. He then encouraged me to make my way in the process of finding a publisher myself without looking for an agent – suggesting that I would be much happier this way.

This week, my husband met a high ranking government official and handed him the same post-card. In an instant, the official promised support for the book and its launch in ways that I could not have hoped or imagined. The official looked at the card and its design, and was inspired to make a tremendously generous offer on the basis of what the book promised from the card's design.

So today I want to thank the tremendously talented people who have been associated with Slim Spaniards’s design.

My cousin Alex Bak and his partner in life Laura Payne took time out from an extremely busy life as proprietors of www.spacefurniture.ca to conceive of and create the book’s logo - the
Miro-esque lady who graces the web site.

Gabriel Abrudan of www.thewire.ca designed www.slimspaniards.com. She chose the font, designed the “swoosh” at the top and bottom of the page and gave the website is playful and upbeat look and feel.

Christian Hanson-Kearn senior student at the Ontario College of Art, took the logo and the website’s font and created a wonderful post-card – 5000 of which were printed and half of which have been given to people in small numbers. The card is not perfect because of an oversight on my part in the French text – but with such great design, that hardly matters.

Thank you also to the two women who introduced me to these talented designers: Sarah Morgenstern of www.savvymom.ca and Cathy Richards of www.wellnessfoods.ca.

A postscript about music on the website.

The website will soon have its 1000th visitor. This boggles my mind – the website has only been fully functional for 6 weeks. So as a celebration of this milestone, I am going to put aside my “techno-peasant” hat, and figure out how to load up onto the website a recorded track of my father-in-law singing one of my favorite flamenco songs. Some time ago, we locked him up in a top-notch recording studio and he sang a number of flamenco songs. He could have been a professional singer, but the stars never aligned to make that happen. Perhaps he will have a career late in life like some of the Cuban legands.

It may be a while before I figure out how to make the song downloadable but that might be next.

The Next Wave of Writing

2005-12-15T11:14:00.000-08:00

“Markets For This Book” was updated today. It is now shorter and more focused. It makes more sense and is easier to read. So that was today’s bit of housekeeping. It feels like the thinking around the book is now more focused, the writing about why the book should be published is tighter. This is good. I now need to develop a contact list of potential publishers in the UK. The Writer’s Handbook (UK) and The Writer’s Market (US) are on their way – I should have ordered these some time ago but such is life.

I think it is time to go back to the book. The website is current if not perfect. The marketing materials are more solid than they were two weeks ago. “About The Book” now feels right. “Markets for This Book” is also improved. The Business Case for the book is in good shape. The web site’s traffic is steady and is trending to hitting 1000 visitors soon enough. The current manuscript is being copy edited.

If writing the book is 30% of the work and selling it is 70% of the work – it certainly feels like I have put in the requisite 70% over the last month.

So can I now turn my attention to the book itself? As though I needed to ask someone for permission!

Most of my writing efforts to date have been building up the parts of the book. These parts include narrative to explain both the particular and the general, anecdotes to illustrate what is remarkable, flamenco poetry and song to add richness, character development and description to bring humanity, historical descriptions to explain deep connections, recipes to illustrate how it all comes down to the people and what they choose to eat. Eventually there will be photography (at least some of which will be from photo essays I taken on very the years) and funny caricature drawing.

It now feels time to take these many pieces and set them next to each other in a way that really shows each of them in their most exquisite light. Some pieces should be placed next to others for harmony, others for contrast.

Deciding how to do this is my next task.

I am still thinking of the conversation I had with The Cheese Maker. She suggested that the book could be sold with a small CD of my father-in-law singing flamenco. I haven’t said this to him yet but I know he would love it. When I booked the recording studio for him some time ago, there was much complaining about his voice not being in shape but in the end, the rest of us were done in before he was. The idea of his voice making its way into many people’s homes would make him glow with pleasure.

Ode to the Cheese Maker

2005-12-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

My goodness two posts in one day! It feels like there is flow today.

A wonderful woman who spent years in publishing took time out of her start-up crazy day to offer some ideas and advice.

She confirmed, there is no need to allow this book be squished into the "cookbook" category. Culinary Anthropology is the hottest trend. There are plenty of pages filled with pictures and recipes, so there is no need for this book to be added to that class.

We talked about this book being a Family Culinary Autobiography. This makes a good deal of sense to me. The early readers of the book have all commented about the fact that they love the personal stories, the introductions to people such as my in-laws, children and husband. I love writing these parts of the book. They are the warm, genuine and funny parts.

Now that I have done the research and that I know that my Spanish family is not an anachronism, but is typical of Spanish families in its dedication to food as a core principle of life, it feels absolutely right to tell their story in the context of the larger Spanish story about food.

So I have added an About The Book section to the web site. I have taken away the table of contents that felt way too much like a cookbook. Here is the new section added in About The Book. Thanks to the Entrepreneurial Cheese Maker for her tremendous help. You can see her wonderful work at www.fifthtown.ca

Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day invites the reader to be immersed in the culinary traditions of a Spanish home. There is a place in the living room for the reader to eavesdrop on both the gentle flamenco singing and the arguing about food preparation in the kitchen. There is a place at the table for the reader to see the table plainly set, to hear the chairs scraping the floor, to feel the fierce and brief silence when everyone lifts a spoon or fork and begins to eat the main meal of the day mid-afternoon. There is a place in the kitchen for the reader to taste the food by preparing the family and traditional recipes, some of which appear only slightly varied in a 13th century Moorish cookbook. Be warned though; this is not a romantic tale of landed gentry who don costumes to dance flamenco after lunch in the worst of the mid-day heat.

This is the story of a family from the poorest part of Andalusia who moved to a home with indoor plumbing in the 70’s, whose living depended for 40 years on Antonio as the captain of an inshore fishing boat to catch fish in the Mediterranean, and Maria’s wages as a cleaner. It is the story of a family who very nearly had to emigrate to work in the German factories but who somehow managed to hang on and stay. Through this family we learn that in Spain, food eaten at home, where it comes from and how it is prepared is the bedrock of dignity every day.

In Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day, Celine Bak with her husband Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez set out a family culinary autobiography. They take this personal point of departure to write a food anthropology of Spain. She is a North American business person who has worked internationally. He is a professor of Spanish Twentieth Century History who has come from Andalusia to North American academia. Celine explains what she sees by looking at underlying statistics about economics, health and household spending. She takes this information and with Antonio sets it in the rich context of the 3,000 years of history on Iberian Peninsula, of the Franco dictatorship and the last 27 years of democracy.

Spanish food is fashionable; there is a reason for that. It is fabulous. But that does not change the relationship between Spaniards and the singular place of food in their lives. Food comes only second to family for Spaniards be they richer, poorer, educated or less so. Readers of Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day will be all the richer when they read just why nothing comes between Spaniards and the time and care they dedicate to food and to their family.

Publishers are returning my calls!

2005-12-13T07:13:00.000-08:00

The phone isn’t ringing off the hook yet but publishers ARE returning my calls

Things are going well. Publishers are returning my calls. Editors are replying to my emails. So why do I feel a sense of dread.

I feel that I am steeling myself should the publishers’ answers not be the one I am hoping for. Out on this limb of would-be writers, I’m not sure I am as equipped I would like to be regardless of my years of experience consulting to global Fortune 50 companies and then working in smaller software ventures who succeeded in prosecuting their global plans.

It is by definition lonely on this limb. That I now understand is the writer’s lot. Glory and acclaim with success, and anonymity and bitterness with failure. And of course the indignity of having to depend on other’s for the means of production to make and distribute these little parcels of thoughts and words.

I can’t remember when I last felt quite so exposed. After all, it is my name that sits on the rejected manuscript. Where I come from in business, particularly in start up businesses, there is plenty of opportunity to take chances and to make mistakes (there I go again sounding like Miss Frizzle) but when it is failure that strikes; it is lived by more than one person and it can be a surprisingly uplifting experience.

When bad news comes in, there is an awful feeling that sits in the stomach, and things get achingly still. But soon after, things swing into action once more. With failure (even the worst kind – failing to attain a conservative forecast) comes the responsibility of making sure the team’s confidence and ability are not compromised by this bump on the road. So for a leader, a time of failure is when a leader’s talent is most put to the test. It is ironically, when a good leader can feel most capable and competent because getting the team refocused and inspired can be harder to do than making sure that the team delivers according to plan when the customer says yes. The obvious exception to this is when a company is just starting out and everyone is still figuring out what their job is!

The good news is the publisher has agreed to review the manuscript excerpts. This means that the business case was meaningful. What scares me to death is that if the answer is no, it is because regardless of the business case, the writing is not compelling enough to inspire the general public to buy a book. This would mean that although I can recognize a market for a book, I would be better off finding someone else to actually write the words. Which I suppose is an option.

I stepped a little farther out on the limb last week when I wrote to a number of people who write for a living and whose writing I enjoy. I sent them a note to thank them for their writing and to ask them, if the spirit moved them, to have a look at what I have written. I sent along a small gift, some Spanish Smoked Paprika as well as a recipe. So far no one has written to complain, so that’s a start!

Even though I feel quite naked out here on the limb of would-be authors, it is important to remember that there is a team working on this project. Most are all volunteers. All of them have put more of themselves into this project than I could have imagined or hoped. Perhaps I need to think about what happens to us all if next week, I get a call from a publisher that says that this book is not for them.

But then again, they may say yes and all heck breaks out then!

That Feels Much Better

2005-12-07T11:42:00.000-08:00

Ahhhhh.

That feels so much better. The process of copy editing Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day was launched some time ago, but there is nothing like a deadline to focus the mind. So when it was time to send out a proposal last week, the pencils were sharpened a little more. And a number of nasties were found. All of there nasties were prominently displayed on the web site until today. You see, when we set up the website, I decided that perfect prose was not the point. So, while I re-read, and others re-read what was written there were definitely some sections that felt rough around the edges. There still are. But I feel the pace of putting the text into shape is picking up.

Let me say that the process of copy editing the manuscript will take some time. It is only about a quarter complete, but the process is underway and the corrections will be made slowing but surely. Jane has now taken the copy editing baton. She is as sharp as they come – the doyenne of a very classy bilingual community newspaper. And so the copy edited prose excerpts that were sent in the proposal have been copied back into the consolidated manuscript. To my great relief today, I started to replace sections of the web site prose with those that were edited for the proposal.

Also, on this webmaster day I had the great pleasure of loading up a 4th chapter onto the web site – Chapter 6: Spaniards Live Long Healthy Lives Today but the 50’s and 60’s Were Tough Years. It is the most recent chapter written and my current favourite because I find it uplifting in many ways. First Spanish women live very long, disability-free lives. Only the Japanese, French and Swiss women live longer disability free lives. This is all the more remarkable by the fact that first health care spending per capita is less than half that of the chart topping countries. Second, Spaniards suffered post war privations in the 20th century that were longer than most other countries. Chapter 6 reflects the deep humanity of my family, who having lived the most difficult of times in their childhood and adolescence, can both laugh outright and cry at the poverty they lived.

Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day - coming up for air

2005-12-06T06:11:00.000-08:00

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. It sounds like the kids from the Magic School Bus and it's how I feel about the fact that I abandoned the blog during more than 2 weeks. I am sorry and promise to do better in the future.

Much has happened, all good. So finally there’s a moment of calm to write down what’s up.

I see getting a book published like selling a complex product to a large business. A book is after all, the epitome of complexity. It is filled with ideas, hopefully many of them capturing the spirit of the times. It is launched into a world that changes more quickly every day in ways that none of us can predict. And a book is by definition static. The juxtaposition of the static book with the wild crazy changing world out there makes publishers extraordinary people. Publishers must see the link between the ever changing nature and ambiguity of the world of potential buyers of their books, AND they must be compulsively detail oriented, because a book must be free of all defects - no typos, not comma splices, no blank pages, and each business relationship with retailers of books must be scrupulously maintained.

Selling is after all what turns books into business and profit, which in turns are transformed into the necessities of life – food and shelter. I imagine being a publisher to be akin to looking through a telescope with one eye and a microscope with the other. Publishers make decisions with what they see "in stereo". You have to respect the people who do this. As an aside it seems to me that publishers are not so different from venture capitalists investing in software companies to serve markets they believe may exist in the future. That is the world I inhabited during most of the past 5 years.

My job as an author who wishes to have a book published is to find the people who make the decisions about what to publish, and to convince them that they should consider Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day as a book in which to invest their precious business capital. I say business capital because a publisher invests both reputation and money in a book and while money is important, a reputation is one of those assets which takes a very long time to build but can be destroyed with one very bad decision.

Here are where things stand on the publishing front.

I have been out meeting people. Some of these people have been extraordinarily helpful and have given me the contact details of the people in Canada who make decisions about books to publish. So I now know the names and contact details of some decision-makers in publishing. This is a huge step forward.

In one case, I have spoken to a publisher who has said they would be happy to receive a proposal about Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day. So last week, I worked on the proposal and sent it out. On a slightly smaller scale, it felt like the days when I was in management consulting working on proposals for consulting projects with big companies – the drafting, the editing, the photocopying, the courier etc… The proposal contained a business case for the book. The business case explained why I believe the publisher of Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day will profit both in terms of money and reputation.

In the business case I described a market which is positively disposed to such a book:

- Spain is a key destination for British and other English speaking travelers: 26 million English speakers visit Spain every year including close to 20 million from the UK (16), Ireland (1.5) and the US (1), and hundreds of thousands of foreigners, mostly Britons, are buying property in Spain.

- Spain is becoming known for its food. The rate of references to Spanish food in the American press is growing exponentially - Wine Spectator and The New York Times Magazine have both published major articles. Food and Wine writes about Spain close to every month now when only 3 years ago, there was one article a year.

- The Mediterranean Diet is gaining tremendous support in North America with an increasing number of studies associating the Mediterranean Diet with longer life even for people who have already had a heart attack. Here is an excerpt from the book to get a sense of what is being reported…

“Spaniards are concerned about the Mediterranean diet as an oversimplification of food in Spain, but even so there is a steady increase in the number of studies that confirm the positive benefits from the Mediterranean diet. Here are a couple of examples to get a sense of the findings. In Lyon, they ran a trial to track the impact that diet had on people who had had a recent heart attack. Half the participants followed the American Heart Association’s Step-1 diet and the other half followed the Mediterranean diet – rich in fish and olive oil. Fifty-nine people who followed the Step-1 diet died, whereas only fourteen people who followed the Mediterranean diet died. I never knew my maternal grand-father. He died very young of his first massive heart attack. His diet was the antithesis of the Mediterranean diet.

There have been some small studies that have found that people who suffer from Rheumatoid Arthritis could reduce their anti-inflammatory medication. Rheumatoid Arthritis is an autoimmune disease that affects the whole body. There are also studies which still haven’t reached the human trial stage, that indicate that mice that have been bred to develop Alzheimer’s disease, have considerably less build up of the protein associated with Alzheimer’s when they are fed a diet rich in building blocks of fish oil. Another study found mice had better memory on the Mediterranean diet rich in Omega 3 fish oil. Go figure. Spanish parents routinely tell their children that they will be smarter if they eat another grilled sardine!”

- A book that comments on the place of food in our lives is no longer a niche. Our relationship with food is changing and this has started to be a worry. Fast Food Nation, Super Size Me¸ and French Women Don’t Get Fat are all evidence of this fact. At one time, a food commentary was very legitimate book. Indeed there have been commentaries on food and its place in our lives for a long time. The thirteenth century book that I refer to in Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day is all about what food means in the lives of people in the 1200’s. More than ten years ago, Margaret Visser wrote Much Depends on Dinner. The book was acclaimed around the world - the New York Times put the book on its list of the best books of the year. From 1950 to her death in 1994, Elizabeth David wrote about food and the place of food in the lives of people in the Mediterranean, France, Italy and Britain. So the genre of a food commentary that may or may not contain recipes has been around for some time.

But French Women and Fast Food Nation have each sold over a million copies. These books have captured some compelling essence of our time. Could it be that we are worried about the impact that reducing food to “fuel” is having on our lives? The dreaded O word (OBESITY) is everywhere. French Women offered a pragmatic and fun view on food as pleasure, while keeping up appearances so to speak. Slim Spaniards offers a fun view on food as the stuff of both body and soul, while feeling connected to the world, keeping the household going and living a long and healthy life.

In my business case for the book, I offered other factors that may have a positive impact on the book’s sales. These included:

- Humour - my favorite part of writing Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day is writing the funny bits. I do this after the hard slog of structuring the ideas, doing the research to support the ideas, writing cohesive paragraphs, linking the paragraphs; you know all the good stuff they taught us in high school, in university and speaking personally, again in our first jobsJ When all of that is done, I get to think about the book as though it was written by someone else, and add the funny bits. These funny parts are usually from personal experience. I am hoping that the publisher I work with will agree to take the humor one more step by agreeing to add funny cartoons. I am dying to have a cartoon of “the family of 5 riding a Vespa” in the book. Or of a small child whose eyes just come over the counter top, standing in front of the Serrano ham waiting for an uncle to offer to slice a piece for her. Or of the Spanish family installed for the day at the beach complete with tent city, barbeque, wading pool for the small children, portable radio (for the soccer match) and cloths line. You get the picture.

- Knowledge of the Arab world – In yesterday’s paper there was an article on the fact that fiction book sales have declined, and one of the theories to explain this is the fact that people’s world was upset by 9-11 and they now want to read to understand the world better, and in some cases to understand the Arab world better. I wrote Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day in part because I wanted a platform to describe the wondrous period of prosperity that existed in Spain under the Arab rule.

It is important to me that people know that for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages on the Iberian Peninsula Arabs, Christians and Jews not only got along, they prospered.

- Connection to 20th Century history. Paris 1919 by Margaret Macmillan (Author), Richard Holbrooke (Author) is a success that has surprised everyone in publishing. To me the book’s success is not surprising at all. It explains the origins of the geopolitical strife we live in, and do this in prose that is well written. Yes there are the obvious historical connections in the commemorations of the Second World War, but I believe this book’s success is to a great extent because people want to understand how they are connected to world events and who world events are connected between themselves.

As a mother of 11 year old twin girls and a 4 year old girl who always worked outside the home, I felt acutely cut off from the world even as there were more media to deliver the “content” than ever before. I believe I felt this way because these new media simply were inadequate for the “content” that I craved (long live Marshall) – insight that I could related to but that was not superficial. I cannot sit through televised news. Its superficiality drives me crazy. Radio and print are more my pace, but when I was employed and worked long, long hours, and boarded far too many aircraf, I rarely connected with these media. What I craved was book that could provide me some connection to the world in the 15 to 30 minutes of wakefulness between putting the kids to bed, getting ready for the morning drill and falling asleep. If the book could make me feel connected while bringing a smile to my face, all the better. My hypothesis is that people might buy Slim Spaniards because they are interested in food and health but they will recommend it and give it to others because it is a good read that helps them understand their connection to the world.

- Generosity – I believe that generosity is at the root of good. Good manners are about being generous – as Lynn Truss has observed, there is no guarantee people with reciprocate. A very wise colleague lives very successfully by the maxim: “Always assume positive intent in business relations”. Think about that in the political mine-field that are many workplaces and you get lost in its implications. Much of business is about suspending disbelief about new ideas long enough to appreciate if a business case is strong and markets can be viewed in a new way that can be profitable. Suspending one’s own values and priorities long enough to do this requires generosity.

Generosity in turn is a function of being at ease and comfortable with oneself. I am comfortable with the fact that this book may be a success. I believe that if it is successful, people who are having a hard time now should benefit. For this reason, if the book is successful, royalties will be donated to two causes – African children who have lost their parents to AIDS and Aboriginal children’s literacy. The publisher I have sent my proposal to has a history of publishing books for children, so perhaps this factor will be one of the factors that weighs favorably in their decision.

Thank you for following this process. If the spirit moves you, let me know what you think.

Reason number two for publishing Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day

2005-11-16T08:23:00.000-08:00

This blog is about the process of looking for a publisher for my book Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a day. I wrote yesterday I am writing about something that is important to me; that Spain is a puzzle to me that I have been trying to figure out for more than 21 years. I believe that Spain is a puzzle that I believe may be of interest to others.

Spaniards inspire me. I say this after many years of careful consideration, as someone who has occasionally been told that I have impossibly high standards. Spaniards inspire me for many reasons. One of the most important is a steadfast commitment to be true to themselves. Spaniards simply do not compromise about what is most important to them. Nothing comes before family and food. Family comes before everything. In Spain people don't have friends they have cousins.

Spaniards are prepared to make two commutes to work every day in order to abide to their commitment to family and to eating as well as they possibly can.

Spanish food is becoming fashionable. Glossy food magazines have features Spanish food regularly during the past 2 years. There are Spanish chefs who now enjoy rock star status among food enthusiasts in North America. These chefs are collecting Michelin stars for their restaurants and are publishing exquisite books about the new Spanish Cuisine. Their food is divine.

But this phenomenon simply has no bearing on what Spaniards see as a central tenet to their lives. For Spaniards, "eating some of everything" is the key to health. Spaniards are suspicious of attempts to codify the Mediterranean diet because they see it as an intrusion of business interests into the realm of food. Food is Spain is important and it is about eating at home, as well as one possibly can.

When I lived and worked in Madrid, I was a principal in a prestigious management consulting company. I had come to Madrid as a principal of the Toronto office of the same company and had spent 4 years working in North America - on the road 4 days a week, working 60 to 70 hours a week. In Madrid I found colleagues who worked just as hard and long, but when it came to lunch - or The Meal as it is called in Spain - all bets were off. Few were the reasons which would cause my colleagues to skip the most important meal of the day, at home between 2 and 4. I thought to myself, this will change. The advent of the single European currency will lead to more integration and will lead to changes in the way people work. Well if there are changes they are still nascent. Ninety percent of Spaniards surveyed by the National Sociology Institute in May 2005 said that they are against taking on a European schedule and forsaking the Spanish two part day.

It impresses me that Spaniards refuse to bend on what to them is a first principle. It seems to me that this leads to a number of very positive consequences.

Here is a start of a list of these positive consequences:

- Spaniards expect and get very high quality food from the food industry. As a for instance, Spaniards generally will not buy Spanish tomatoes grown for export - they are red or pink and round, and have pretty green stems, but they have no taste. They are worthless to Spaniards. Nearly a fifth of all meat purchased in Spain is from organic producers.

- Spaniards live long healthy lives. With total healthcare spending at about a half of Japan's, a third that of France and a quarter that of Switzerland, Spanish women lead the fourth longest healthy lives in the world after Japan, Switzerland and France according the World Health Organization.

- Spaniards spend money on what they value. They spend about twice as much on food than on housing. Americans spend twice as much on housing as on food.

I have learned a great deal from Spaniards about food, and I believe others might like to as well.

I am laying to ground work for finding publishers. The web site is one step. Getting the word out about the manuscript is another step. Finding the right contacts takes time, and that is what I am working on now. More about this next time.

Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day - Why publish this book?

2005-11-15T09:32:00.000-08:00

I would like to find publishers for my book called Slim Spaniards Eat Six Times a Day. About 4 weeks ago, I decided that I was ready to take that step. I have never published a book before but decided in June 2005 to start writing. Five months later, the book is mostly written.

I think it is ready to be considered by publishers. With considerable trepidation, I have put up parts of the book on a web site. http://www.slimspaniards.com/ November 3rd was the launch of the web site. It was designed and configured by http://www.thewire.ca/. They did a great job.

However, putting content out there for all to see is unnerving. There are commas missing, there are sentences that are still too long, there are paragraphs that have no focus. But there comes a time when you need to say, it is good enough to start looking for a publisher, or perhaps an agent.

For more that 15 years, I have worked either in large corporations or in businesses that service large corporations. This is the first time that I have attempted to make a place for myself in the world of people and of the choices they make in their lives with their time and energy.

So who am I to be able to convince people to spend time reading ideas that I have committed to print? There are many reasons. So I will start with one today... The first is that I am writing about something that is important to me.

To me Spain represents a life long learning project. I married a Spaniard 14 years ago. My 3 daughters are both Canadian and Spanish citizens.

I did not grow up in Spain and so Spain is a puzzle to me. I am beginning to understand the puzzle, it fascinates me and there are parts of it I think others will also find interesting.

My parents-in-law are people for whom I have tremendous respect. From all accounts they are normal retired people living on a small fixed pension. Maria and Antonio are extraordinary to me in that despite the extreme hardship they have lived through, they are open minded, generous, fun, happy and quite modern people. They are one of the voices in the book.

They grew up hungry after the Spanish Civil War. As a girl, Maria worked as a servant to pay for food for her younger siblings. Antonio was a shepherd whose wages were sheep's milk for his younger siblings.

They courted 8 years before marrying. They raised 3 children, the youngest, my husband, contracted almost every possible life threatening childhood disease including polio and meningitis. They cared for their children without the benefit of public health care. Maria took a loan to pay for a doctor to care for her youngest son's polio. She carried him on her back to the sea so that he would regain the use of his legs.

They moved into a house with indoor plumbing in 1970. Before that Maria hand-washed all the family laundry at a public washing place, on her day off from working as a cleaner. When their son was finishing his masters degree at university, she pawned part of the household linen to send him money at the end of the month. Today she has a chest of linen that she is keeping for her grand-daughters when it is time to outfit their home.

Antonio, my father-in-law was the captain of a fishing boat when he was only 18 years old - responsible for the safety of between 15 and 20 men at sea for days on the Mediterranean. He eventually owned his own fishing boat. He did this without ever being able to read or write - not even a phone number. He fished for more than 40 years using techniques that were handed down by the Romans. He knows the depth of 100 miles of Mediterranean coast without the help of sonar.

Retired, he is now the chief cook and purchaser of food for their household. While he cooks, he sings flamenco songs whose lyrics are poems documented by the most important 19th century Spanish poet - Garcia Lorca. He lives life richly and food is one of the keys to this.

I started the book in June - a blank page and some thoughts about the meaning of food in people's lives in Spain. During the summer, I interviewed Antonio, Maria and their children Paco and Maria del Mar as well as my brother-in-law Manolo, and sister-in-law Carmen about recipes and food that they felt was core to their way of viewing food.

I pestered my Spanish friends to document recipes from their parents, as well as their own favorites. And I started to interpret these recipes to make them intelligible to people from Europe and North America. This was no small task - a subject worthy of its own entry. As the recipes were documented, I started to think of them in terms of groups - particularly in terms of things that I could manage to make myself when pressed for time and wanting to feed our girls who seem to consume Six Meals a Day.