Happy holidays, everyone! In particular, today is Native American Heritage Day. My wife and I moved to Oregon around this time last year, and I’m realizing I know next to nothing about the indigenous history of the Pacific Northwest. In the spirit of the day, I started to do some very basic research, and was immediately awed by the complexity of the indigenous stories—I am writing this post on the unceded ancestral land of a multitude of tribes, including the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, and Molalla.
I’m going to do what I usually do when I become uncomfortably aware of my own ignorance: read a book. Or, more likely, several books—I’m going to start with The First Oregonians by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, and we’ll see where it takes me.
Hook to Book is now biweekly
(no, not that biweekly, the other one)
I want to take advantage of this off week to make a change to Hook to Book: I’ve been writing weekly posts for about two months now, and the weekly schedule is starting to put pressure on me in an unproductive way. I have a bad habit of taking on extra things in my work life, little by little, until I burn out and have to do a major reset. So I’m going to be proactive, and tackle this before the stress symptoms start to appear in earnest: I’m going to change my post schedule to every other Friday, to give me more time to write thoughtfully. I’ll be back next week, December 2, with a post, and from there we’ll do every other Friday.
As Hook to Book’s subscriber base grows, at some point I’ll take a poll about whether to fill that intervening Friday with a Q&A week—that could be fun, and wouldn’t take nearly as much effort as a full polished post.
In the meantime, enjoy the holiday break! I know I’ve tackled a lot of dreary publishing stuff in these first months of Hook to Book, so here’s a heartwarming moment for a change: video of the moment author Andy Saunders held the first copies of APOLLO REMASTERED, his book of restored Apollo mission photography that would go on to be a Sunday Times bestseller just a month later.
Enjoy the break Jeff. I used to write articles on a weekly basis for the now-defunct FermiNews, a publication of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. After a while that pace became unsustainable, so I know what you mean!