Well! Ambrose made it through the first draft, and left comments for me. I’m working my way through them. I finished selecting all the pictures that I plan to use in the book, and I’m working on creating the captioned plates that I use to properly insert my photos into the manuscript for uploading. I’ve made a few adjustments to pictures that I selected, but that’s to be expected – especially if I realize when reviewing Ambrose’s comments that I didn’t include a picture that would be illustrative of a point in the book.
For example, I realized when I finished captions for the first day’s hike that I hadn’t included any pictures of our tent site at Warm Springs Bar, where we used the Z-packs Triplex as a car camping tent. We haven’t often used backpacking tents as car camping tents, but on this trip it was quite nice. We didn’t have as much gear inside as we normally would while backpacking, so the Triplex actually felt spacious.
I decided to rectify that omission, but when I went looking through my other photos, I realized that I hadn’t even taken a picture of the tent at that site. Oops! Well, I do have one that I’m going to try and use. It has Ambrose in it as the main feature though, the tent is kind of in the background. The photo might be too blurry to include, but I have to make some allowance for morning pictures, because it’s very difficult to get my camera to take very clear images in low light. I don’t like using flash in low light because it tends to highlight just the foreground – plus flash is a battery suck.
Anywho, the book is progressing with more speed now. One full day’s worth of photo plates complete (out of six total), draft review in progress, headers and cover still to be started. But I feel good about the momentum. If I can just get my guts to calm down a bit and give me some peace, then I’m confident I’ll get this book knocked out before the end of the year. If not, well, it will be done when it’s done.
And, I could have put more time in it, but I’m also starting to work on making videos. There’s definitely a learning curve. For now, I’m going to try and put out one video a month to start. During the next backpacking season, I’ll be doing a lot of recording on the GoPro, so I might be able to do spates of more frequent posting with the additional content that will provide.