Well, at least I hope so! I hope that my book is worth waiting for! I also hope that my book is a “best thing”!

By now, if you have pre-ordered my book (and thank you for doing so if you have!!!), you have probably already received an e-mail from amazon letting you know that the expected shipping date has changed. You may have also noticed that I changed the release date in the advertisement on my sidebar.  Yes, the book will be coming out a little later than originally planned–the new release date is October 22nd, 2013.

So, what happened?

No one knew when I started this project just how BIG it was going to be. When we set the release date and my deadlines for turning in the material, the book was only a 24-page outline. This is my first book. So,  I really had no way to gauge just how many words it would take to explain what I wanted to explain and cover all of the topics I wanted to cover. Okay, yes, starting with a 24-page outline should have been a big clue that this book was going to be encyclopedic in scope, but at no time did I anticipate having a conversation with my publisher about the physical limits of book binding.  And my publisher, Victory Belt, who has published most of the best-selling paleo books out there, had no way to anticipate that what I was talking about doing would actually turn into a book of this magnitude. If any of us had known, it probably would have been two books. Or it would have been bound in hardcover and the sticker price would have been double. And, you know what this means? It means that my book is a completely spectacular good deal!

So, what happened is that when we set deadlines and the release date way back when I started this adventure, we were anticipating a book literally a third the size. Victory Belt has never published a book this big with so many different components (or “moving parts” as my publisher likes to call them). We just need more time to edit this beast, pull together all the graphic elements, and make sure that the quality of this book is top notch. For all the time and effort and self sacrifice that I have invested into this book, it’s important to me that we don’t skimp on this process. I want this book to be perfect (yeah, yeah, I know it won’t be perfect and I know typos always get missed, but it’s still a worthy goal). I want this book to help people, to have a real and wide-spread positive impact (and I hope you do too!).

How big is this book? Gargantuan. Think The Paleo Solution, The Paleo Answer and Practical Paleo all in one book, but focused on autoimmune disease. Of course, don’t think this book is just for those with autoimmune diseases because I have gone into details about how foods interact with the gut and the immune system that are broadly applicable to everyone. And I am super proud of my recipes. And my photography, actually (especially given the much lower quality photos I published on the blog when I first started). This book will be useful to anyone who wants to understand how food impacts our health, how lifestyle factors impact our health, and who want a really inventive cookbook too.

Where am I at? I turned in Part 2 of the book and two of the appendices last week (Part 1 was turned in in early April and is already being edited and sent to the graphics design team to start in on the illustrations). AND I turned it in on time!  Woot!  Parts 1 and 2 together are about 187,000 words.  There’s something like 30,000 more words in the appendices and I’m still working on a glossary of terms (there are 1185 references, which comprise about 25,000 words just on their own). I have no way to predict how many words the recipes will add, but I think it’s typically for recipes to add 30-50,000 more words. Just to give you some comparison, Practical Paleo (my favorite paleo resource guide for anyone who is trying to figure out which of the many paleo books out there to buy before mine is available!) was about 90,000 words (including recipes).  I am not exaggerating when I use words like gargantuan. And I am not exaggerating when I say that we are still trying to figure out how to format this book so that we can physically bind it (and still be able to read it!). Maybe we should do a special edition next year in hardcover…

In fact, this book is so big that when I went back to edit Parts 1 and 2 before turning them in, I didn’t remember writing a large proportion of what I was editing (I did write it though! Promise!). It was very surreal, reading my own words but without really remembering writing them… like reading someone else’s book but with a déjà vu type feeling of familiarity (ever accidentally read a novel that you read years and years ago but forgot that you read?… feels kinda like that). The cool thing is that this distances me a little from the writing so I can be a little more objective about it (and while I am still clearly biased, I do have to say that what I am reading is pretty darned good!).

I am now in full cookbook mode, which is Part 3 of The Paleo Approach (okay, the glossary is still science mode, but other than that it’s cookbook time). I am writing shopping lists and meal plans, frantically trying to finish a few recipes I really want to include, rephotograph recipes that I developed early on and that the photography is just not up to par, going through thousands of photos, and typing up the 105 plus recipes that are scribbled in three different notebooks (at this point, I am anticipating about 120 recipes in the book).  And, I’ve got two weeks to finish.

So, I hope you can be patient with me while I continue to focus most of my energy on finishing this book (the rest goes toward being a wife and mom) rather than creating new content for the blog. And I hope that waiting an extra month for my book won’t seem like too much of a hardship.  I am working extremely hard to make sure that it will be worth the wait.