Hello 2026!
Some room to breathe, finally, and a return to writing here.
The last several months since I signed off from here were a whirlwind. I signed off from writing but I also stopped reading newsletters completely. My brain had no room for anything but 1: my book, 2: my family, 3: work, 4: friends, 5: the collapse of the world. That’s it. Which, is A Lot.
Bleary eyed, I sent off my manuscript to my editor at 2:15 am on New Year’s Day after spending the prior 72 hours writing furiously. I swear this book grew more difficult with every word I typed. It was, pardon the terrible imagery, like a piece of food you keep chewing and chewing and somehow you just can’t manage to swallow it because the food keeps growing in your mouth. Yeah, yeah, I know. But really, that’s how it felt. The other metaphor was about moving, how when you are moving houses and you see all of the boxes you’ve packed up and you think you are really almost done, and then you look around all the rooms at the random crap still strewn about and you realize just how much is left to pack. Then you start throwing it in random boxes just to be done—you’ll deal with it when you unpack later. Of course, behind all of that is cleaning up! It feels never ending, you are just never going to move! Or, in this case, I was never going to have some kind of finished product, despite the fact I had seen the finished product in my mind for months already. I knew how it was going to come together but it had to get out of my brain first. Which felt unimaginable until the moment I was done writing.
The cleaning up part, well, I had done most of that as I went along but there are some minor formatting issues I do still need to deal with, unfortunately. Of course later that day I thought of some things I wanted to add to clarify a few points and I’m pretty sure I should have added photos into a few spots in the introduction.
Speaking of photos, did you know what a huge pain in the ass it is to format placeholders for photos and maps? Wow, did I learn a lot about that. I’m still unsure if I did it right. At 9:00 pm on December 31st I turned my focus to this “last thing” I needed to do, the photo placeholder labels, thinking, surely it won’t take me three hours to do…I’ll be home before midnight! No, it took me almost 5 and I slept in the floor of my work office for the second night in a row. That’s the thing about this book: I could not accurately determine how long something was going to take me to write or finish at any given point in time. It all went so much slower than I was thinking it would.
The maps…oh, the maps! Don’t get me started on that. I had been working on them steadily since late July, reformatting some of the ones I had begun to work on a year before when I was just starting out on all of this. I didn’t particularly like what I’d come up with for my proposal, especially after I had started collecting data. GPS points for things like bridges would not line up with waterways or wetlands I could pull from public agency sources that I was relying on to use. I quickly realized I could not be placing a bridge over a creek that was significantly off in any capacity. And I couldn’t just move the bridge because then mileage wouldn’t add up. So, I started drawing in waterways using aerial imagery and LiDAR. Maybe one day I will get into the amount of work I put into gathering background data for this but it was extremely time consuming to download and then mosaic together and then toggle back and forth between layers. I use GIS for my day job so making maps is part of what I do as a career but this was much more than what I was anticipating. And my perfectionist tendencies took the driver’s seat many times. I could have probably slapped the trails down on a USGS topo map and called it a day but in the end, and knowing what I’ve seen of topos over the years, they sometimes suck and don’t provide much information, especially on short trails. And in this part of Texas, everything is flat.
That was the maps. Then there was the writing, which I didn’t start doing heavily until November after I’d finished hiking my last trail in late October. I already had my outline and sample hikes from my proposal, plus had been writing in my brain for more than a year, so I knew how it would come together. But between finalizing maps and toggling back to writing, wow. So many bits of information to source, a lot I already had but then I had to dig around for more things. This is where I know I ended up jacking up some on the consistency in some areas which I will start fixing next week while I wait for my editor to get back to me with edits on his end. My least favorite thing was trying to describe the terrain for a trail or park. I don’t know, there’s dirt and mud, sometimes, and vegetation…it’s flat. What more do you want to know? It’s a trail in the woods! Come on! I know that stuff is beneficial, I just could not describe it well at all because it was so boring to me.
So, that’s out of my hands for now. I received an out of office reply after I submitted, which I expected given the holiday season. I still have some things I need to wrap-up, including a photo caption sheet and apparently an alt-text photo sheet (a new addition I just found out about), which should be Lots Of Fun given I had 136 photos.
I’m looking forward to writing here again. I have a lot of commentary that I’ve been holding onto the last half year. I have many thoughts about what I have learned about hiking the places I hiked the last two years. I may hold off on that part for a bit because I am formulating at least one other book in my brain about it all. I will say, I don’t think we’ve learned many of the lessons I thought we had learned from the past. I believe a lot of us tend to look at some of the conservation movement of the last 60-70 years with rose-colored glasses, when in reality things were and are a lot starker than we realize.
Be back soon with more writing!
Congrats on submitting your MS!
Can't wait doe your book!