Monday, November 09, 2020

What a year! Bigfoot in Maine update etc

 Hi everyone--

This update note is long overdue, as are so many other things in this completely bonkers year.  The good news is, although I'm still fighting to keep my shop (The Green Hand Bookshop) afloat in the midst of all this, my upcoming book, Bigfoot in Maine, has meanwhile been quietly moving ahead.  It is making its way through the maze of editors and formatting designers at the publisher, and if all goes well we'll be looking at a release date in the first half of 2021.

All the illustrations are done, photos are tweaked, chapters written, and everything indexed.  Phew!!!  There was a lot of back and forth about how long it could be, and in the end I had to cut almost half of what I had written, but I fought to keep in the bulk of the most important part, in my view -- the oral history of eyewitness accounts. 

Some of the parts I had to pull out will show up here or in print as articles, so that they still see the light of day.

I am still talking with folks about their encounters, and with those out in the field investigating current activity, even though Covid has restricted my own travels for the foreseeable future (again, trying to keep the shop going has been intense, and we're not out of the woods yet).

Just for fun, I also recorded a short adaptation of the Maine story "Hobgoblins of the Wild North Woods" by Winthrop Packard, published in the Boston Evening Transcript, back on Dec 31, 1902. While it is ostensibly fictitious, it contains many elements of Bigfoot sightings reported even today.

You can listen to it here for free -- enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/mys-648503636/a-hair-raising-bigfoot-yarn

I hope you have all stayed safe and well in these trying times, and I wish everyone better days ahead.