It's Coming!

Attention, dear readers! Gather 'round and listen, for I have been waiting more than six years to make this wonderful announcement: We have a publication date for the book!! December 15, 2018, will be the first day that any interested parties--you, for instance--can personally own this beautiful book:

I am so excited for you all to be able to read and use this guide to explore the wide variety of foods available on the streets of China. I really and truly hope that it will be of use to travelers in the Middle Kingdom. With this book in hand, you will never be at a loss of foods to try.

Watch this space for more updates in the coming months--it should be a thrilling time.

I'm Back! (But Did I Ever Really Leave?)

Friends, it's been much too long since I've posted here. Perhaps you thought this project was dead. That I had abandoned it like yesterday's jam. Like a film you keep meaning to watch but keep putting off because you're not in the right mood and then eventually it goes off Netflix and you pretend to feel regretful for a short time (I had planned to finally watch it this weekend, I swear!) and then never think of it again. Like an old shirt lying unused and forgotten in the back of your closet, thought of now and then but never taken out and worn, until one day it is thrown out unceremoniously in a frantic moving day purge.

Well, I'm here to tell you today that this project is not dead. It is, in fact, most vibrantly alive. Why has it been so long since I last communicated with you through this humble website? Lots of reasons! Some good (e.g. fun job, new baby, old baby--all keeping me busy), some not so good (e.g. deaths in the family keeping me busy). The core of the matter, though, is that I simply had nothing to report. Things were plugging along with my publisher but I had no tangible news to share. The first piece of anything I had seen in a while was a draft of the cover that came in last fall. It wasn't ready to share publicly yet, so I held my tongue for the time being. Now it looks as though there will be some news coming through pretty soon, so I thought it was time to start things up again around here. Dust off the old writing gloves and stretch those old typing fingers. So here I am. Back again. Ready to talk about street food. Keep your eyes out in the coming weeks for more posts. I hope you're as excited as I am.

Four Year Update

In a pleasant little confluence of events, the very same day I left for China to conduct research for my book, some of our favorite friends had their second child. Earlier this week, that child turned four. Unbelievably, this means it has been four full years since I embarked on my big China journey. I never imagined it would take so long to get this book out into the world, and yet here we are.  Some delays have been worthwhile and some haven't, but all have contributed to the long process. 

All that being said, you may be asking where things stand with the book right now. Well, here's the good news: earlier this week I sent my last bit of text to the publisher! What a lovely feeling to have that off my plate. Now the publisher is working on layout and design. Once that's complete, I think we'll be pretty close to publication. Stay tuned here for updates in the coming months.

In the meantime, thanks for your continued readership and interest. I'm grateful to every set of eyes that has skimmed through this page.

Big News

Hello, friends, followers, Sinophiles, and street food lovers. As you might know, I've been working on this book for a good long time now. Several months ago, I posted a three-year update explaining where things stood on getting it out onto the market. Among the reasons I cited for it not being finished was that I was taking some time to look for a publisher, rather than going straight to self-publishing. At the time I said, "I am going to keep heading that direction [i.e. searching for a publisher] for a few more months. If nothing pans out then I will go the self-publishing route."

Well, here we are a few months later, and I'm very pleased to announce that something did, in fact, finally pan out. Today I'm happy to share that I officially have a publisher for my book! My new favorite publishing house is Blacksmith Books, an independent Hong Kong-based publisher that "focuses on publishing China-related non-fiction." The contract is signed and we are now moving forward into the editing stage of the process. If they are looking forward to working with me as much as I am looking forward to working with them, I think it's safe to say that this will be a great partnership.

So, big sigh of relief over here in North Carolina. No more emailing publishers and agents and getting no responses or "no" responses. I'm thrilled to be at the point where I am now--closer than ever to getting this book off of my computer and into a bookstore near you. If you're wondering when that might happen, I am afraid I don't have a clear answer for you. But you can be sure that I will keep you updated here (and on my Facebook page). In the meantime, sit tight and know that Blacksmith and I are working hard to have a finished copy in your hands as soon as possible.

So that's the update. Thanks to all for your continued support. This has been a long process, and I am ever grateful for your steadfast readership and interest.

Three Year Update

Well, another year has come and gone. It's now been three years since I left my wife in DC and jetted off to China for my culinary research trip / adventure. I've posted updates at the one-year and two-year marks, so I figured I might as well provide another annual update now. As regular readers (you know who you are) may recall, a year ago I finished writing the bulk of the book, and yet here it is 2015 and it's still not available for purchase. So what happened between then and now? Two things prevented the book from being totally finished. For one thing, my life got in the way a little bit. The list of life things that made me put a hold on book-work includes such items as buying a house (with some logistical surprises along the way), traveling during a couple of months for my other job, and visiting with family, but the biggest life event standing in the way of getting the book to market was the birth of my wife's and my first child. Since my daughter was born, especially after my wife's maternity leave ended, I have been a stay-at-home dad, acting as her primary caregiver during the workweek. Believe it or not, taking care of an infant sucks up a decent amount of one's free time. (Who knew?) So my ability to work on the book was seriously inhibited for parts of the year.

Also, I broke a Guinness World Record last year.

The other main reason that I don't have the book on the market yet is that I am actively hunting for publishers. I had been on the fence about self-publishing vs. traditional publishers, but last spring a friend convinced me to give the traditional model a real, honest-to-goodness try. So that's what I've been doing. Much of the time I did have to work on the book in the past year has been spent contacting publishers and waiting to hear back from them (hello to any publishers or literary agents reading this!). The waiting is killer, since you can't do anything active towards completing the book--you just sit and wait for a response to come (which it usually doesn't). So it's a bit discouraging. Nonetheless, I am going to keep heading that direction for a few more months. If nothing pans out then I will go the self-publishing route; I am determined to have the book available for purchase by this time next year.

So that's what's going on. It's not an especially satisfying update, I'm sure, so hopefully I'll have something more substantive to offer soon. Thanks for reading and for your continued interest/support!

Progress Update (Two Years Later)

It was in January of 2013 that I last gave the world a progress report on my book. Much has happened in my life and in the world at large in the year that has elapsed between then and now, and that includes a certain amount of writing. Today seems like a good day to give a new update on how things are coming along.

Due to certain obstacles and non-writing commitments (some of which were highlighted in the writing update from last January), there were about 8 months in 2013 in which I didn't write a single word of the book. In an effort to subdue the forces conspiring against the completion my book, I made a point of planning my end-of-the-year schedule so that those obstacles and commitments largely vanished after the beginning of October, leaving me several months to focus on writing. That planning paid off: as of yesterday, I can officially say that I have finished writing the bulk of the book!

So what does that mean? It means that I've written up short reviews for each of the hundreds of street foods I ate in China. For every single food, this entailed deciphering handwritten Chinese characters in my notebook, researching the dish to learn its history and ingredients and to be sure it actually originated where I am telling people it originated (often needing to pore through inscrutable Google translations of Chinese websites to get my information), and trying to come up with an engaging way of describing it that doesn't sound exactly the same as all the other write-ups in the book (how many ways can you say delicious, spicy, or oily?). When I was in a good writing routine, my general goal was to do this for five foods a day, a goal that fit comfortably in the middle ground between not getting enough done and not getting burnt out. This whole process was (I hope) the most time-consuming part of writing this book by far. All that remains to do now is editing, layout, a little bit of fact-checking, writing a few introductory sections, wrapping up a few other odds and ends, and publishing. I'd guess that I have less than 15% of the work remaining. I don't know how long this might take, but I am confident it won't take nearly as long as the writing I have already done. My basic estimate is about two or three solid, unhindered months of work. Unfortunately, I have some commitments coming down the pike so I don't have that kind of time available right away. Nonetheless, I hope to have this book finished and out on the market later this year.

So there you have it. That's where things stand right now. I'm pleased to have the day-to-day tedium of slogging through these write-ups behind me, and I'm looking forward to the next stage in the process. Naturally, I'll try to keep you updated as things continue to progress. Onward!

One Year Later

As of last Friday, January 11, 2013, it has been one year since I left for China on my grueling street food expedition. It is hard to believe that a year has already passed since that gray January day when I packed my bag and walked to the Metro station, the first of countless trip segments. I was both excited and apprehensive about the daunting three months ahead of me. At that moment, my most pressing concerns were a) that I forgot something important when I packed, and b) that I already missed my wife. Three months later I came home exhausted and ready to write. It is now nine full months since then, and the question I get most often is "how is the book coming along." My standard answer to that question is "very slowly, but surely." That answer remains an accurate summation of where things stand.  Nonetheless, I thought I might use this one year anniversary to expand on that a little bit and update a wider audience on the book's progress.

The slightly longer answer to that recurring question is that the book is taking much longer than I expected to finish. Here are a few reasons for that:

1. You may know that I've never written a book before. This is my first shot at it, and that means that I'm doing a lot of learning as I go and trial by error. Sometimes those errors result in delays, retracing my steps in order to rewrite things I've already written, and making things more complicated than they need to be.
2. It turns out I am no good at estimating how long it will take to finish a specific section. Something that I think should take an hour or two ends up eating a whole day or two of work. For each individual entry I must decipher the handwritten Chinese characters in my book (sometimes this is easy, sometimes it takes over half an hour); look the characters up in an online dictionary; research the food to learn about its history, check on ingredients and cooking methods, and verify that it does indeed come from the city I was told; write a paragraph or two about it without sounding like all of the other paragraphs I've written (this is getting harder as time goes on...there are only so many ways to describe oily, spicy bowls of noodles with only minor regional variations). Multiply that a bunch of times for each section, and it ends up dragging the writing process out longer than I anticipated.
3. I do have another job. It is not, thankfully, a full-time, 9-5 sort of job. The work comes in three-week blocks away from home, with a week or so at the end for wrap-up work.  I've done four of these since I returned from China, which adds up to three to four months of time during which it was difficult to get more than a trace of work done on the book.
4. Believe it or not, when you work at home by yourself with no clear deadlines, it is incredibly easy to get distracted. Sometimes by reasonably important things (e.g. "Oh, the dishes need to be done," or "The car needs to get inspected today," or "Shoot, my quarterly self-employed taxes are due tomorrow!") and sometimes by completely inconsequential things (e.g. "I should learn how to tie a fancy tie knot," or "I haven't checked the news in the last twenty minutes...I wonder what's happening in the world," or "Hey, aren't there a couple of cookies in the kitchen that I haven't eaten yet?"). (Note: all six of those examples have happened to me.) I recently read that Don DeLillo once said "A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it." I can't speak for others, but that certainly seems to be the case with me. It has taken a long time to get into a good and consistent writing routine. I think I've got one now, which means more productive hours in a day, but it can still get thrown off fairly easily.

So there you go. Those are the things that have conspired to keep me depressingly far from the finish line. At this point I wouldn't want to hazard a guess as to when I'll be finished. All I can say is that it is progressing steadily--just very slowly. Put enough of these slow yet steady days together, though, and the book will be done. In the meantime, I'll work on getting some good blog posts up and continue to update you all on the book's progress. As always, thanks for checking in!