I Guess I'll Go Ahead and Let the Cat Out of the Bag

Well, it's official, at least on paper: I finally signed a publishing contract to put out the book I've been chipping away at for the past year. If I haven't been posting here too much of late, well, you know why...

The book is titled "Dispatches from the Daehan: Six Years on the Korean Peninsula." It's a travel memoir of sorts, with a lot of other information about teaching here and steeping in the culture. It's being put out by Signal 8 Press, a new indie press out of Hong Kong being started by writer/publisher/editor and general madman Marshall Moore, aka [info]msminpdx.

There's really not a lot out there on Korea right now. There's some scholarly work that gets published - much of it dealing with The North - but very little in terms of travel writing and first person points of view. The blogosphere is full of stuff but the book shelf is looking a bit light. I was just in Powell's this summer, which is the largest bookstore in the Northwest, if not on the whole of the West Coast, and checked out the "Asian Studies" section. There was a whole AISLE of stuff, mostly concerning itself with China and Japan. When I got the "Korea" section, I saw that it occupied just three measly rows (more like two and a half, really).

With thousands of teachers schlupping it over here every year, I think there is a market for this thing; my publisher evidently agrees, so if all goes as planned, there will be a book available, both in print and online, sometime this late spring.

I still have a lot of work to do. I'm finishing up the last couple of chapters and have a fuckload of revision ahead of me. I've got two months to do it in, so I'm freeing up my schedule and gettin' to work.

So don't expect too much around here in the near future. Once I'm done with this thing I can play again, though "play" is the wrong word, since it's this here blog that gave birth to the book.

I'm stoked and stressed and jumping into the damn acid bath. A typhoon is approaching The Peninsula as I write, which is somehow appropriate... I like a bit of a tempest.