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!