Done is good

It’s a book! The manuscript for Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea has been dispatched (virtually, a zip file dropped into the publisher’s dropbox). Math Man captured the moment for me. I read some 500 papers, drank 400+ cups of tea, made about 100 chemical figures and gathered it all together into what will become a 150-ish page book early next year. The final paper copy of the manuscript weighs just over 700 grams — printing it out for a last read made it feel very real. Paper has more heft than electrons. (Yes, I realize there are a lot of electrons holding that paper together!)

“Done is good!” is what students and faculty say at Bryn Mawr to encourage each other to finish something. It may not be perfect (should I have written more about matcha? Or about wind ovens and samovars? Maybe.), but it is finished. And done feels very good! So I am off on two weeks of vacation, with some time to read things unrelated to tea. (First up, Velvet is the Night, a very noir novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia set in 70s Mexico. I spent a summer there in 1973, so the setting really comes to life for me. I adored her Mexican Gothic, and some 60 pages into Velvet I am entranced.)