My original:
“I’d bless and place the second piece just above the hairline on my head and utter a word of praise to God.”
Their change:
“I’d bless and place the second piece just above the hairline on my forehead and utter a word of praise to God.”
No! There will be no foreheads invoked in my tefillin-wearing!
I know it sounds like a minor quibble, but it’d easy enough to misunderstand absolutely the wrong thing. Last time around, my publisher deleted a single punctuation mark that–I kid you not–changed the entire meaning of a sentence, so I went from interrogating the categories we often use around race to boldly asserting that I thought Ashkenazi Jews were people of color. Which is, um, not what what I ever meant to assert. That was kind of embarrassing.
The good news is that the book is almost off to the printer!! Ready to hit stores in August (but hey, why not pre-order now?)
The other good news is that I am about to start what very well might be the last actual real paper for a class in my life. It might not be–who knows what sort of sick decisions I may ever make in the future about additional grad school? But it’s just as likely that it might be. That’s kind of cool.