You can stop pretending. I know you don’t really care. But I’ll tell you anyway.

I’m closing in on a long-time goal.

I have the proof for the first of three books that will cover Jewish prayer for Shabbat (one book), festivals (another book) and weekdays (a third book). I’d like to think that, with the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur books, this completes the cycle of Jewish prayer, all transliterated, all non-sexist, all egalitarian-friendly. All vegan and recyclable.

The books are pretty complete, with a lot of material that other books don’t bother to translate–though I know there’s always another obscure medieval acrostic or another prayer for long-gone Jewish leaders in Babylonia that one could revive because it’s traditional.

It’s all transliterated, side-by-side with the Hebrew and the translation.

It all follows the new standards: tell the congregation what to do (when and how to sit, stand, or respond); show people when prayers are quotations from Torah or from other parts of Hebrew scripture.

The fonts are more legible and more precise, too, with thanks to Microsoft for having made Unicode (fonts with every character in every language’s alphabet) part of their operating system for many years.

It’s going to be a big change. I’m planning that the Friday night and Shabbat morning books will be special orders only; the single-copy books will be the “complete” ones; and since they’ll be 300-450 pages, they’ll be hardbacks. They’ll cost more, but they’ll be worth more.

I showed someone the proof; how does it look? “It looks like all your other books.” I’m not sure whether to be disappointed. I want the page to help people as much as is possible in black and white, so I don’t want the changes to be jarring, but I hope they’ll be effective.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m working on one of the final details, the poems we use to call up the honorees for Simchat Torah, but I thought that anyone who actually reads my blog might be interested in what’s forthcoming from the Singlish Publication Society, where we’re as miserable and guilt-ridden as we ought to be!