Living and Birding Gratitude: August 2018

I wrote a book. Almost two years in the making, it is now available (see links to purchase at the end of the blog).

I love to write. I have created songs, and I have drawn and I have painted, but I love writing best. I love letting words flow from my brain though my fingers into whatever magic they may weave. It does seem like magic to me. They often take their own path and lead me where I am intended to go. Which sometimes is not where I originally thought I was going. That is the magic of writing.

I began blogging several years ago. As we went off for a year of travel and birding from August 2015 to August 2016 I blogged regularly about it. I used those blogs as the framework on which to build the book, The Year. It has been an amazing process.

Planning at our kitchen table in North Carolina (that table, cut smaller, is in the tiny house here in Lara).

John Weigel writing out his suggestions on the routing and an itinerary for our year. This was on a table at the Biggest Week in American Birding in May of 2015.

I started writing The Year in earnest sitting at my table overlooking Croatan Sound in September of 2016. That was in our beautiful (two bedroom, two bath) cottage in coastal North Carolina. If I could have that house transported here, I would literally, be in heaven. But it is there in the USA and I have chosen, gratefully and happily, to be an Australian for the rest of my life. I hope to go back and visit, but I am living full-stop in Oz. No regrets.

I am proud of this book. I have put more effort into this than I have put into any single project in my life. It has been a long time coming. The initial plan was to have three versions, and I hope that will be the case in the not too distant future. There will be an eBook as well as an ‘economy’ version without photos. The colour photo version was all ready to print, so I decided to put it out there and refer to it as a prerelease. I have some issues with the printing company and might change that in the future. We will see. For now, I am pleased with the quality of the book they have printed. But I cannot put it onto Amazon yet, which is where I would like to be able to sell it.

The design layout of the book was done by my dear friend Lily Kumpe and I love how it looks. She also did a lot of work on editing and such. There is far more to creating a book than I knew. The continual proofreading was amazing, and not in a good way.

I am worthless as a proofreader. My ADD makes me “see” what words are supposed to be rather than what they are. But I still proofread the whole thing at least three times. Lily proofread it several times. My friend Anne proofread an early version and my friend Carolyn proofread the final(ish) version. Carolyn found mistakes that everyone had missed. Then we printed another proofing copy and yet still found some errors. Such is working on a three hundred and sixty-some page book. By the way, if in reading it anyone finds any mistakes, please just keep them to yourself. Hahaha.

And I should mention that I wrote it (to the best of my ability) using Australian English spellings. There was much debate about this back when I began to edit, and the consensus was to use the spellings of the country where I live and the journey took place. I also included a glossary in the back with some of the Aussie and birding terms explained. Here are a few photos from that wonderful year of travel. I hope with all my heart (as I do) that I was able to capture at least some of the amazingness of that year in my book. I reckon I did.