The Lawson Trek
  • Home
    • About
    • Interactive Map
    • The Trek
  • Along the Path: Blog
  • John Lawson
    • "A New Voyage to Carolina"
    • The Carolina Colony
  • Talk to us!
  • Store
  • Press

Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

And we're off!

3/27/2018

0 Comments

 
Hey you guys! What with having a job and raising kids and having to spend every stinking free moment out in the streets demonstrating to save the nation from mad persons, you could lose track of things, right? And yet somehow, scrape together evenings, weekends, a lot of long nights, one weeklong vacation spent mostly in the Flying Pig Coffeehouse on Oak Island, and a monthlong break from work last fall, A Delicious Country turned into first a draft, then a manuscript, then a revised manuscript, and now an actual book project in press at UNC Press. 
Picture
Don't run to your bookstore just yet. We'll go through copyediting and page proofing and art placement and book design. We'll make decisions on things like running heads and chapter opening spread design and we'll spend an enormous amount of time thinking about things like the subtitle (open to suggestion!) and cover design (whenever I get involved it seems like I mess things up) and where to put the art and what to do with it before we put it there. Then we have to actually print books and all that. But then one day a truck will drive up to my house and throw a box on the porch, and when I open it up, there will be, you know. A book and everything. We expect A Delicious Country to exist in corporeal form in March 2019. I've had this project on my desk in one form or another since around 2011, so that starts to seem like an awful lot of fuss.
Picture
Just the same. When you turn in book the people at your publisher act like they think you're a big deal, and they treat your work with respect, which is empowering. And we were talking about whether this book needs an index, and my editor, the fabulous Mark Simpson-Vos, said, "we need it for future researchers." Did you catch that? With the value of blogs like this, the facility of ebooks, and the very uncertainty of these madpersons-in-charge times, one can fall into the habit of not having a lot of hope for the future of things like books about obscure explorers. But Mark not only has the cool head to think of the future, he thinks enough of this project that he can envision future researchers finding this work valuable. I have spent the last most of a decade poking around in books written by other people who have looked into Lawson, his time period, and the workings of history, science, anthropology, and various other aspects of this marvelous broken world of ours. It's nice to think of this being valuable to future researchers in something like the same way those books have brought value to me, and I hope to my readers.

It's easy to fall into despair; things are going so rough. But here's to Mark, who believes in the future, and to the future researchers who may find value in A Delicious Country. Here's to readers who read books because they think the world is interesting and beautiful and worth understanding as best we can. Here's to all the people who have helped this project in so many ways (I just finished the acknowledgments; they went on for pages). Here's to the readers on this site who have kept me going. And here's to us all meeting in a bookstore sometime about a year from now, talking about Lawson and the Santee and the Sewee and the Catawbas and the Occaneechee and the Tuscarora and the Huguenots and Charleston settlers and dugout canoes and alligators roaring and biological specimens in the London Natural History Museum. Let's just all move forward as though that will all happen, right? 

​Working on a project like this, a project that takes years and if it generates money doesn't generate much, is finally a vote of confidence in the future. If it offers nothing else, it offers my effort as a token of belief that it's worth working hard to understand the world. It's worth sharing that understanding. And it's worth believing in the future. So anyhow thanks for believing in this project, and see you in a bookstore in a year or so. 

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    January 2020
    October 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    August 2017
    May 2017
    August 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014

    Categories

    All
    Adventure
    African American
    Angie Clemmons
    Anthropocene
    Apothecary
    Appalachian
    Archaeologists
    Archaeology
    Army-navy
    Art
    Artifacts
    Atlanta
    Backpack
    Banking
    Barbecue
    Barry Beasley
    Bath
    Beaufort
    Beckee Garris
    Beetle
    Beginning
    Ben Franklin
    Berm
    Bill
    Birds
    Blister
    Book
    Bookstore
    Boston
    Botanical
    Boykin
    Breach
    Brent Burgin
    Brownlee
    Buck
    Buffer
    Cabelas
    Cambridge
    Camden
    Camera
    Canoe
    Canty
    Catawba
    Chain
    Charleston
    Charlotte
    Chelsea
    Chocolate
    Chris Judge
    Church
    Cincinnati
    City Of Raleigh Museum
    Civilization
    Coe
    Comment
    Community
    Concord
    Confederate
    Contentnea
    Cornwallis
    Country Music
    Couture
    Crawford
    Creek
    Croatoan
    Cutler
    Cypress
    Danger
    Davis
    Death
    Delightsome
    Delk's
    Denton
    Devices
    Drake
    Drawing
    Drunk
    Duck
    Durham
    Eagle
    Earnhardt
    Earth Day
    East
    Ecologist
    Effron
    Embankment
    End
    Error
    Evans
    Exhibit
    Expeditions
    Facebook
    Feather
    Fern
    Finish
    Fire
    Flag
    Flintlock
    Flood
    Francis
    French
    Gaillard
    Gander Mountain
    Garden
    Geology
    Gimpy
    GIS
    Google
    Great Wagon Road
    Green
    Greenville
    Grifton
    Guerry
    Gun
    Guns
    Haigler
    Hallenbeck
    Hampton
    Hanging
    Hannah Smith
    Harris
    Hartford
    Harvest
    Heat
    Hempton
    Highway
    Hillsborough
    Hips
    Historic Bath
    Hollow Rocks
    Home
    Homeness
    Hortus Siccus
    Hospitality
    Huguenots
    Huntley
    Indians
    Instagram
    Interstate
    Island
    Ivy
    Ivy Place
    Jamaica
    Jarvis
    Jennifer Landin
    Jered
    Jimmy White
    John Jeffries
    John White
    Journalism
    Kadaupau
    Kannapolis
    Katawba Valley Land Trust
    Katie Winsett
    Kayak
    Kershaw
    Keyauwee
    King
    Knife
    Lame
    Land
    Language
    Lawson
    Lawsonians
    Lecture
    Legacy
    Legare
    Legislators
    Leigh Swain
    Lenoir
    Lenoir Store
    Lenses
    Library
    Lichen
    Lies
    Loberger
    Locke
    London
    Longleaf
    Lost Colony
    Lynch
    Lynching
    Magnuson
    Mansplaining
    Maps
    Mass Shooting
    Match-coat
    Mathematical
    Meerkat
    Memorial
    Mental Floss
    Mill
    Millstone
    Miniature
    Monkeyshine
    Moonshine
    Museum
    Museum Day Live
    Musings
    Nancy
    Nascar
    Native American Studies Center
    Natural History Museum
    Nature
    Nesbit
    Netherton
    Neuse
    Newspaper
    Nonfiction
    Notebooks
    Occaneechi
    Orlando
    Pack's Landing
    Palmetto
    Pamlico
    Park
    Patent Leather
    Pedestrian
    Peggy Scott
    Periscope
    Petiver
    Photography
    Physic
    Pig
    Pig Man
    Pittsburgh
    Pocket
    Poinsett
    Polo
    Potsherd
    Pottery
    Preparation
    Presentation
    Press
    Process
    Proofreading
    Property
    Publishing
    Raccoon
    Racing
    Racism
    Racist
    Raleigh
    Rape
    Ray
    Readings
    Reconsideration
    Records
    Revolution
    Richard Smith
    Richardson
    Rights
    Riparian
    Rivulet
    Road
    Roadness
    Roanoke
    Robert Off
    Roland Kays
    Rolling Stone
    Roombox
    Rules
    Salisbury
    Santee
    Sapona
    Sassafras
    Scan
    Sconc
    Seneca
    Seth
    Shakespeare
    Sir Walter Raleigh
    Slavery
    Slime Mold
    Sloane
    Slope
    Small Town
    Smith
    Smithsonian
    Snow
    Sore
    Sounds
    Spanish Moss
    Specimens
    Speedway
    Spencer
    State Fair
    Steve Grant
    Stewart
    St. Mark's
    Suburban
    Sumter County
    Surveying
    Swamp
    Tar River
    Technology
    Textile
    Tide
    Tobacco
    Toms River
    Tool
    Towel
    Trade
    Trading Ford
    Trading Girls
    Trail
    Trap
    Traunter
    Tree
    Tree Farming
    Trek
    Trilobite
    Troi Perkins
    Truth
    Tryon
    Tupelo
    Turkey
    Tuscarora
    Twitter
    Ugly
    Unc
    Val
    Val Green
    Virginia
    Virginia Dare
    Virginia Historical Society
    Walking
    Washington
    Waxhaw
    Weather
    Website
    White
    Writing
    Wrong
    Yadkin
    Yoga

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly