The second book

I've been keeping this blog for nearly five years, and every so often, I create a post that I come precariously close to deleting before I publish it — whether it's too intimate, too "off subject" or too personal. The previous post was one of those. I "wrote" most of it in my head while driving home from Salt Lake City, sleep-deprived and trying to process a swirl of emotions. I tapped it all out after work on Monday, late at night. Then I read it over and decided that I didn't want to publish it. I thought it straddled the barrier of comfortable and uncomfortable for both my family members — all of whom read my blog — and strangers who might happen across it. But a few years back, a woman writer who I greatly admire told me, "Whenever you're convinced you should throw a piece of writing away, that's the stuff you really need to keep." So that's how I treat my blog. Generally, I keep it pretty and bikey, but every once in a while, I venture out.

I'm going through similar thoughts right now with my "Great Divide Book." I've talked about this book on this blog before, and recently have received several questions about it from both family members and a few blog commenters, so I thought I'd update. I started the project last August, completed a couple of chapters, and put it down for most of the fall. I picked it back up in December and dove into the writing full-bore. I was riding less and generally just trying to cope at my place of employment and my personal life in Juneau. I was trying to make some hard decisions, and the project was very cathartic for me. It helped me through a tough period, and I was genuinely sad when I finished the initial draft in March. I went through a couple of self-edits and decided to start pursuing publication in May. I was "funemployed" in Anchorage at the time, and although a overwhelmingly large block of my time was dedicated to the fun side of things, I did spend quite a bit of time researching options and sending out proposals to agents. I caught the initial interest of three agents, one of whom seemed poised to pick it up. However, everything came to a head during a period of monumentally bad timing, the very same week I had been offered a job in Missoula and was faced with uprooting my entire life. I dropped the ball in an embarrassing way, and the agent rightly decided to end discussions with me. So now I'm back to square one, except for I'm employed full-time, and have other training aspirations brewing that will cut into my free time even more.

I could start over, but I find myself asking why I should bother. It does seem a bit futile as a writer to aspire to traditional print publication when the entire industry is struggling. So many jobs are being cut and profits are being slashed that there's almost no money in it for writers, except for a small fraction of the most successful, and niche publications by little-know bloggers about little-known bike races aren't likely to find their way into this upper tier. I could follow a growing trend that I tapped two years ago with a fair amount of success — self publication — and I am considering it. However, before I went forward, I would need to fund a professional edit that I'm not sure I could afford right now, and then there is the time investment that I found to be surprisingly large when I experimented with the format two years ago. Plus, for all of its advantages is the modern market, self-publication of books still carries a huge stigma that I admit does bother me a little. It is still considered preferable to be "legitimately" published, so much so that all serious writers pursue it even when all of the evidence suggests the payout is laughably small for all of the time they have to invest.

My first book, "Ghost Trails," I wrote because I felt I had to. It was something I sincerely believed I had no choice but too create. It really wasn't intended for public consumption until the 11th hour, when I cobbled together a "book," zoomed over to a self-publishing site, and hit "send." I learned a lot from that experience, and now have better ideas for a possible second go. At the same time, I also created the Great Divide Book for personal and admittedly cathartic reasons, so I often wonder if it wasn't just meant to be bound and placed in a drawer, the way so many memoirs have for so many years.

But that's what I'm considering right now. It may be a while yet before I make any solid decisions. In the meantime, I need to somehow find a third project to begin. I can try to improve my Great Divide Book as much as I want, but I miss the intimacy and excitement of its initial creation.

Eight years later

On this day in 2008 ...

On November 1, 2008, I sat in front of my clunky desktop PC in Juneau, Alaska, pondering what I wanted to do with this PDF file I'd spent a few months creating. It was a book I cobbled together from personal essays and blog posts, about this obscure thing I did earlier in the year — riding a fat bike 350 miles over the Alaska Range and into the frigid Interior — and a loose timeline of past events to provide some explanation about how a Mormon girl from Utah with no athletic talent and lots of fears could reach that point.

My blog was as popular as it would ever be, with nearly 100,000 hits per month, and I figured at least a small percentage of readers would be interested enough in the story to buy a book. But would anyone else be interested? Selling a book is a difficult prospect. In order to catch the attention of publishers, the story has to appeal to a larger audience than the few interested in esoteric outdoor sports. Even if the book did sell, the process could take years. I was a journalist, and the thought of "Ghost Trails" being released in 2011 or 2012 — when not even I would care about the story anymore — seemed like a pointless endeavor. So on that (likely rainy) November evening eight years ago, I wavered at a self-publishing Web site, contemplating the possibilities. Could it be that easy?

That's how I started down this path of writing and publishing adventure memoirs. It's been a sometimes bumpy but mostly enjoyable ride. I'm still a journalist at heart, and think of my own writing as such. It's not high literature and it's not painstakingly revised, but it's real, occasionally raw, and as honest as I can make it, within the confines of my own flawed memory. I want my stories to be timely, but I've been known to sit on a project for years (in fact, I'm trying to revive a 2012 project right now.) In the midst of the learning process, I've managed to sell tens of thousands of books. And this is a cliche, but my greatest reward has been comments from people who found inspiration and embarked on a new adventure. Overall, the results have been pretty good for a Mormon girl from Utah with no athletic talent, lots of fears, and exhaustive dedication to weird endeavors that will never appeal to the mass market.

Now it's November 1, 2016, a date I specifically chose to release "Into the North Wind." Today this "Ghost Trails" sequel becomes available on Amazon and other online retailers. I was planning to write something more to celebrate the release, but I've been feeling a little ambivalent about it as of late. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's this phase I'm going through. Today I was working on queries for the Guardian, and thought, "But I don't really want to be a writer. I should try to get more editing work. Maybe I can find a coach who will know a revolutionary way out of my breathing malaise, and I'll start training hard. Because if I was just a little more tired every day, I wouldn't spend so much time worrying about writing."

I am grateful to everyone who bought "Into the North Wind" so far. I've sold 150 copies of the photo book, which was more than I expected and more than made the project worth it. The best journalism combines photos and words, and it was fun to finally do this in book format. There are still a few more copies available at this link:
http://www.arcticglasspress.net/agp/?wpsc-product=into-the-north-wind

There's also a less expensive regular (black and white) paperback on Amazon:
Into the North Wind: A Thousand-mile Bicycle Adventure Across Frozen Alaska

And finally the Kindle version, which can also be read on phones and iPads using a free app from Amazon.
Into the North Wind

As always, I appreciate your support over all these years. Thank you!

Only one more shopping day!

Date: Dec. 17
Mileage: 39.2
December mileage: 470.6

I completely forgot to hold my LIVESTRONG drawing for a book this week. I plugged the pleasingly large numbers into a raffle and Nancy P. is the winner. Congratulations! I sent you an e-mail, but if you didn't receive it, post a comment and let me know. I'm going to hold another drawing this Friday, and this week's pool is still relatively small. Five bucks nets you one ticket. You can donate to the fight against cancer here.

Also, Thursday is the last day to buy a book in time for Christmas. I'm going to make a trip to the post office Friday morning for shipment on "Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, depending where they live (in the U.S.)," according to the postman. Then it's Christmas. You can purchase a signed book or two or several from me directly by clicking on the gold "Buy Now" button in the sidebar of this blog.

Thank you to everyone who supported me in my book-selling efforts this past month. Sales have been strong, better than I expected, and I appreciate your contribution to my "Iditarod fund," as well as your comments and suggestions. Geoff and I were just talking today about the idea that if I could somehow maintain the book sales I've had in the past month, I could make a modest living by riding my bike all the time and occasionally entering a crazy new race and self-publishing a book about it. Of course I know I can't keep that up - on all fronts - but it's fun to dream.

I took one step into the dream life by working hard yesterday and today and achieving my goal - a 30-hour workout week. I've noticed that toward the end of a long workout week, I can't get away with the same things I can when I'm fresh. Like riding for 3.5 hours and not eating anything. I do this all the time, but at the end of a 30-hour week, it cuts a lot deeper. My blood sugar was so low after my ride today that my hands were shaking. And I couldn't recover as the day wore on. My heart rate stayed high, and my energy level remained low.

I know, I know. Classic signs of overtraining. So what am I going to do about it? I'm going to do one last long ride tomorrow. I'm hoping for eight hours if I can survive it. I can't say I'm particularly thrilled about the idea when what I really want is an eight-hour nap, but there are several reasons I think this is important:

1. The weather forecast is calling temps between 8 and 14 and gusting winds to 40 mph, which will drive the windchill to 20 below. I know. Sounds awful. But it will give me a chance to really test the clothing I've put together for the Iditarod, minus stuff I don't own yet (but won't really need when the weather is as "mild" as 20-below windchills. Ha!) It's one thing to go out for two or three hours, and it's quite another to go out for eight. That will give me time to really identify problem spots, like sweat pooling on my back or cold toes.

2. The psychological training for the race is as important as anything, and I really need to become reacquainted with putting in tough, long efforts when I am 100 percent less than fresh.

3. I also need to gain better understanding about maintaining performance when I feel like stopping, so I can avoid another 12-hour bivy in the Farewell Burn.

4. I need to work on eating enough calories to cover my effort during longish efforts. I didn't do so well last week. This week, I won't have much choice, because I think my glycogen deficit is spent.

Should be fun. Or wait, fun's not quite the word. Should be educational. After that, it will be time for rest and recovery, I promise.

Hold back the rain

Date: Jan. 10
Mileage: 30.1
January mileage: 258.4
Temperature upon departure: 24

Saturday, tempo ride, 30 miles, 2.5 hours. My knee felt much better today. Still some soreness, but I've concluded the problem was almost entirely in having my seat too low. I originally lowered it to help leverage better steering control on the foot paths (i.e. winter singletrack.) I greased the seatpost heavily because it is a tight fit anyway and always a beast to adjust, and I'm guessing that caused it to slip down a little more before it froze in place. I fixed the problem today with a little help and a lot of leverage from Geoff. I am going to install a new seatpost soon.

But I felt a lot more comfortable and even a little faster heading out North Douglas today, despite yet more new snow. I pedal as hard as I can, until my quads are screaming, but that doesn't really translate to speed in these conditions. I've decided that any time I average more than 10 mph, I can count the ride as a "tempo" ride. Nearly 40 inches of snow has fallen since Jan. 2. That would translate to a 120-inch snow month if it continued at this rate, but it's not going to. A warming trend has commenced, and rain is in the forecast now. I wish the rain would hold off for two more days. After that, I'll be gone. But it probably will come Sunday. And when it does, rain on top of several feet of dry powder snow is going to make everything, and I mean everything, horrifically sloppy, nasty and completely unbikeable. Since I've lost my momentum in my 10-day training binge anyway, I see a bit of slumming at the gym in my near future.

But, on a different note, I wanted to share something I found during random Internet browsing:

It's a picture of guys in the U.K. reading my book! They didn't send this photo to me. I found it while I was browsing the blog sites of other 2009 Iditarod racers. I'm guessing one of them is John Ross, who's living the dream and training for the Iditarod Invitational in another typically wet, cold coastal climate. I was pleasantly amused. I never really thought about the possibility of other racers reading my book. I hope it doesn't dissuade anyone from showing up at the starting line. (I have to admit that I question my own sanity when I think too much about my experiences last year.)

I haven't posted about the book in a while, but it's still available. I've made a few edits since the original version and it is slowly becoming more polished. Such is the nature of spontaneous indie publishing. I've sold a little more than 500 copies since November, which is awesome! I'm slowly working on increasing the distribution. It's available now at Hearthside Books in Juneau and Speedway Cycles in Anchorage, and should be up on Amazon.com pretty soon. I'd love to further increase the distribution, but have taken close to no time to actually market the book. I still have yet to send out review copies to several magazines and publications that requested one (I keep running out of my own stash of books.) If you have a favorite little bookstore or bike shop that you think may be at all interested in stocking a book like this, send me an e-mail at jillhomer66@hotmail.com and let me know where/how I can contact them so I can send them my pitch. I'm happy with the lucrativeness of this book so far, but I think I've nearly tapped out the market from my blog. Time to branch out.

Joining Team Fatty

Date: Dec. 3
Mileage: 38.5
December mileage: 84.3

As many of you out there in the world of blogs already know, Elden aka "Fat Cyclist" aka "Fatty" has organized a massive fundraising effort for the LIVESTRONG Challenge. In honor of his wife, Susan, and countless others who are fighting a battle with cancer, he is aiming to raise upwards of $1 million for cancer research and support. I spent a few days thinking about how I could get involved. I didn't think I was going to sign up for an event because I wasn't crazy about the date of the Seattle event, and the others were just so far away.

But then I got an e-mail from my friend in Utah, Chris, who announced he not only committed to raising $5,000(!), but also intends to ride the century in Seattle(!!). Chris is not your typical cyclist. I'm not even sure he'd call himself a cyclist. He's a therapist who sometimes works upwards of 70-80 hours a week. He loves to hike and camp but rarely has time for either, and admits that right now he's "in the worst shape of my life." Chris and I traveled through Alaska, along with Geoff and another friend, Jen, in 2003. Just a few days into the trip, Chris learned his mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer. He was nearly on his way back to Utah before his mom strongly encouraged him to continue with the dream trip he had been planning for months. I watched him wrestle with his guilt and grief, and try to comfort his mom from afar. He had a head of long, wavy hair and he shaved it all off in solidarity with her. His mom won her battle with breast cancer. Many do not. When I found out Chris was getting involved with Team Fatty, I felt inspired.

I signed up for the event that I'm still not sure I'll be able to attend. I'd love to go, not only to ride with Chris, but to finally once and for all meet Elden (I know. It's crazy. He lives less than 10 miles from the place where I grew up, but we've never met.) So right now, I'm in for 100 miles in Seattle. That was the easy part. Now the hard part - raising funds. Luckily for me, Elden contacted me with a wonderful idea.

He is holding a series of raffles to help inspire people to donate a few bucks. Next Tuesday and Wednesday, he'll be raffling an Olympus Stylus 1030 SW digital camera. You may recognize this camera because I rave about it all the time. It's my camera, only newer, and less abused, and with even more special features. It's shockproof to 6.6 feet, waterproof to 33 feet, crushproof to 220 pounds of pressure and freezeproof down to 14 degrees (I've used it while it was 25 below and can attest that it continues to work well below 14 degrees.) And you can have a chance to win this camera by visiting www.fatcyclist.com next Tuesday and Wednesday and contributing to the LIVESTRONG Challenge. If you win the camera, you to can take mountain bike ride shots like this:

(OK, you'll have to come to Juneau to take a mountain bike shot exactly like this.)

I'm going to throw in a few books for the raffle as well. But, in an effort to coax a few people to donate early, I'd like to offer signed copies of my book to the first five people who donate $25 or more to the LIVESTRONG Challenge through my personal page. I'm "AlaskaJill" on the Seattle team. (Click here to donate.) Every cent will go to this amazing cause, so it's a good way to get the book if you've been thinking you might like to read it.

Also, I wanted thank those who recently bought signed copies of my book through my new Paypal page. The Thanksgiving holiday put my printing back a few days, but I am expecting my order on Thursday or Friday, and will send out books shortly after. I ship priority, so you should have them by the following Wednesday or Thursday. I want to apologize for the short delay, but I have things rolling now and my turnover times should be much shorter from now on. (I can process Christmas orders until Dec. 15. After that, there are no guarentees.)

There's a couple of new reviews of the book. One from Mike Jacobsen. (a cyclist in Washington), and a "non-biker review" from my sister, Lisa (not biased at all.)

I also got a few nice e-mails from readers, including this one from Heidi Olson: "I've really enjoyed reading your book - your descriptions of each day on the trail made me feel like I was right there. I had to grab for a warm blanket several times and I'm sure that I consumed more peanut butter cups then you did through the entire book."

And from Karen Ness: "I really enjoyed the way you flashed back to previous years leading up to move to Alaska, alternating chapters with your Iditarod travels. That was a great way to tell the story. It broadens your base and allows the reader to learn more about where you came from and how you got to where you were on the trail. The way you expanded your story helps for anyone who has followed along on your blog. It is a new story even to old readers."

So what are you waiting for? Go donate! (And then come back Tuesday and donate again for a shot at an awesome camera.)

Into the North Wind

I'm preparing to send out the first batch of "Into the North Wind" photo books. These feature a magazine-style layout for my story of cycling across Alaska on the Iditarod Trail in March 2016. It's been an enjoyable project, but the final stages are always grueling. I'll be glad to release this into the world, which is the best way of letting something go.

A brief summary of the narrative: In early 2015, I finally committed to a long-standing but intimidating dream to ride one thousand miles across the frozen wilderness of Alaska. As soon as I launched into preparations, things began to go drastically wrong, until I was standing at the starting line of the 2016 Iditarod Trail Invitational and more convinced than ever that Nome was a step too far. The rest is the story of taking on the most fearsome endeavor of my life, one tentative step at a time.

If you've read "Be Brave, Be Strong," this is a fitting sequel, with a lot of the same themes. I sent out an early copy to a friend who recently posted this excerpt on Facebook, which sums it up:

"Most of the answers we find in endurance sports are contradictions. We suffer to feel alive. We exhaust our bodies to fill our souls. We compete against others to bond with them. Beat will rant about the insignificance of sport amid all the issues facing the world, but much of his free time is dedicated to participation, as is mine. I have raced many thousands of miles, both as a mountain biker and a trail runner, and feel no more satisfied or accomplished than I did at the starting line of my very first race. I fear I’ll never be satisfied. But no, fear isn’t the correct word at all. I’m glad I’ll never be satisfied.
Sport is an enduringly beautiful way to stay in motion, experiencing life."

The photo book is something I've long wanted to make. During the Iditarod I captured a number of compelling images, and it's always a little disappointing to post them on my blog and let them disappear into the vacuum of cyberspace. A paperback is something tangible ... a sort of scrapbook ... and was fun to create. These will be available through the end of this year. Signed copies can be ordered at this link:

Into the North Wind full-color photo book, $29.95 plus $5.95 shipping:
http://www.arcticglasspress.net/agp/?wpsc-product=into-the-north-wind

A digital version of this photo book is $9.95 for a screen-quality PDF, e-mailed to you:
http://www.arcticglasspress.net/agp/?wpsc-product=into-the-north-wind-duplicate

There's also a "trilogy" package of "Becoming Frozen," "Be Brave, Be Strong," and "Into the North Wind" for $49.99 at this link:
http://www.arcticglasspress.net/agp/?wpsc-product=three-book-package

On Nov. 1, a traditional black and white paperback and Kindle version will be released on Amazon. Pre-orders here:
Into the North Wind: A thousand-mile bicycle adventure across frozen Alaska

The table of contents and a screen-shot of (non-consecutive) photo book pages:

As always, I appreciate your support in these endeavors. Even as a journalist there are much more lucrative things I could be doing than autobiographies about obscure endurance sports, but I'm grateful I've had the opportunity. I may branch out to different genres just yet, but this was a particularly meaningful experience that I tried my best to capture. 

If you have any issues with the link or other questions, please e-mail me at jillhomer@gmail.com. 

"8,000 Miles Across Alaska"

Tim and I in the Ptarmigan Valley of the Alaska Range in February 2014. I had the pleasure of spending much of
my time in the 350-mile Iditarod Trail Invitational traveling in close proximity with Tim and his wife, Loreen.

For the past few weeks, I've been finishing up the details of a collaborative book project I worked on with Tim Hewitt, a biography about his many adventures across Alaska. Like everything I do, this one is long overdue, but I'm excited to announce that "8,000 Miles Across Alaska: A Runner's Journeys on the Iditarod Trail" will be released on Aug. 18 in paperback and eBook from online retailers worldwide. For those with Kindles or related phone aps, the eBook is already available on Amazon. The eBook also can be pre-ordered from iTunes and Barnes&Noble. As of yet there are no plans to sell signed paperback copies directly, but that may change.

I'm happy that this project came together. I've long been a fan of Tim's — I wrote a short letter to UltraRunning Magazine advocating for a "Performance of the Year" nomination in 2011 before we'd properly met — but never anticipated being approached to help tell his story. Tim has been racing the Iditarod Trail since 2000 and has amassed an overabundance of amazing adventures in that time — along with volumes of notes. Tim wanted help refining these notes into a book. It seemed like a dream project, but turned out to be quite challenging. How does one capture someone else's experiences and make them come alive? My own autobiographical storytelling is heavily based in inner thoughts, and I didn't have this luxury with Tim's book. I spent far too much time trying to develop a nonlinear storyline that just wasn't working, so I scrapped the whole thing and started from page one with a traditional timeline, keeping much of Tim's voice intact. I think it turned out well. Response has been good so far. And, if nothing else, it's high armchair adventure entertainment for the price of a few gels.

The scrapped early versions of this project became the genesis for another book project I've been working on. I realized I was inserting far too much of my own voice in Tim's book, where it didn't fit. And yet I feel compelled to write about this ongoing love affair with the Iditarod Trail and the intensity of experience in winter and multiday endurance racing, and how that expands to the experience of everyday life. I know, I've written a lot about such things. I have a whole 9-years-old-and-still-going blog about such things. We'll see where this goes. But for now, this is "next project" until I can get the Ann Trason biography moving and/or light a fire under older projects that I haven't abandoned fully, just yet.

"8,000 Miles Across Alaska: A Runner's Journeys on the Iditarod Trail" will be available on Aug. 18. I will post links when it's released.

Order the eBook for Amazon Kindle here.
Pre-order the eBook for iPads from iTunes here.
Or for Nook from Barnes & Noble here.
Or a generic ePub for all eReaders here.

A little housekeeping

There was a "winter storm advisory" for the Santa Cruz Mountains above 1,200 feet on Thursday, so I set out in the afternoon to see if any rare white flakes had graced the tip of Black Mountain. There wasn't any snow, but there was thick frost forming on the gravel and smooth ice across puddles. After a week of smoggy inversion, the air was so clear that I could look out across the valley and see intricate details in the cityscape and red sunlight stretched over the white domes of the Mount Hamilton Observatory, some 25 miles away. It was a beautiful afternoon, punctuated with a toe-tingling descent into the eerie quiet of the canyon at dusk — and finally, for the first time this year, actually dressed warm enough for the 2,700-foot plunge (thanks winter storm advisory.) Happy Hour. Or two.

I've been working on some blog updates, and I wanted to address something you may or may not have noticed on Jill Outside ... ads. Sigh, I know. It's an experiment. I'm working on setting up some advertising contacts for Half Past Done and decided I should test the waters with Google Adsense. But as I researched the program, it occurred to me I could get a much better sense about the earning potential of such advertising at my personal blog, which receives a decent number of direct hits every day. I've stated before that I never wanted to monetize this blog, and I don't. I'm doing this with a plan for it to be a temporary change. Still, it's interesting to see what this blog has "earned" in the 24 hours these ads have been up. While the numbers aren't going to send me to Disneyland anytime soon, I can't help but wonder what might have been if I sold out on day one of this blog's seven-year lifespan. That would be a fun vacation.

I also finally linked to Half Past Done in the sidebar. There's a feed-reader below the logo so you can view the headlines of the latest updates.

Also updated my blog links. There were more than a few dead or nearly-dead ones in there (why do so many bloggers abandon their blogs? This makes me feel lonely.) I'm going to fill up the links with more of the blogs I browse occasionally and enjoy, but the link lists are truncated to the top ten most recently updated. This is my own way of acknowledging my gratitude for frequently updated blogs.

Finally, I updated the book list with the most recent links, including my most recently published book, the blog compilation "Arctic Glass." If you enjoy the content at Jill Outside, the best support you can offer is one of those "cups of coffee" purchases of an eBook. If you don't have an e-Reader or iPad, you can purchase a PDF or text file from this link that can be read on any computer. Your support is appreciated.

One last update — the book projects. I am getting very close on one of them. It's a memoir about the year I lived in Homer, Alaska. If I tried to blurb it in one short sentence, I would call it "A love story about Alaska" but this makes it sound kitschy. There's a few different elements to this story — new Alaskan, quirky community, the trials of navigating young-person poverty and a need to survive harsh winters, and a sudden and strange desire to ride bicycles very long distances in the snow (I promise this is only a part of the book's content.) I've been working to incorporate more humor and less endurance focus in this book than my others. I need to work it through the editing process and, of course, finish it first. But I am hoping for a spring release, early summer latest. I am thinking about titling it "Becoming Frozen," in honor of my many Modest Mouse references in the early days of this blog.

Thanks for reading. Your support may help me avoid real jobs through another great year of adventuring. 

37

I'm spending Aug. 20 in that sensory deprivation portal that is trans-Atlantic travel. It's half past noon here at the Munich airport, so I think it's my birthday in most places in the world. Nothing like sleep deprivation and lots of coffee to spur a ruminative blog post.

I feel like the universe came down a little hard this year after the hubris of last year's birthday post, where I declared that everything was only getting better with age. 36 hasn't exactly been my year of great health, and yet there's still no hard evidence that my relatively minor issues are age-related or even lifestyle-related. Sometimes people's allergies worsen and they develop asthma in their mid-30s. Sometimes people take several wrist-damaging falls on their snowboard as a teenager, and 17 years later finally incur that last damaging hit that leads to debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome. These things happen. It doesn't necessarily mean I have one foot in the grave.

These health issues did lend some valuable perspective. With my breathing problems, I occasionally feel like a 70-year-old smoker, so now I value good days so much more than I did before. Earlier today ... er yesterday ... right before we drove to the airport, Beat and I did a quick run up the west ridge of Bear Peak. It can be a very short route from our closest trail access — fewer than three miles round trip — but with a segment that gains nearly 700 feet in 0.3 miles, it's a great test of fitness. On Friday morning, the air was cool, misty, and almost autumn-like. I was taking it easy — my heart rate was moderate, breathing steady and relaxed, no gasping. We spent a few minutes at the top gazing over the fog-shrouded prairie. This easy effort turned out to be my PR on this segment that I've run more than a dozen times — sometimes breathing so hard that I became dizzy and had to sit down. Good results on runs or rides no longer seem to indicate how hard I'm working, but rather how well I'm processing oxygen on that particular day. Still, good days are now outnumbering the bad, and I feel more confident every day that my treatments are working (or at least providing an effective placebo effect.)

Because of recent asthma malaise, I've failed to fully acknowledge just how thrilled I am with the results of the carpal tunnel surgery I had in June. I think most people don't realize that carpal tunnel syndrome can be a disabling injury when it becomes severe enough, and my case went from zero to severe literally overnight. I had CTS for all of three months, and during that time I lost most practical use of my right hand. I also developed constant low-level throbbing pain that occasionally escalated to electric shocks. Now that the pain is gone, it's interesting to look back on those three months and realize how much it impacted my daily life. A lot of people live with chronic pain, and I always wondered how they could possibly cope. I know CTS doesn't come close to the worst or even typical level of chronic pain, but it did expand my perspective on living with pain. It's surprisingly easy to absorb it into day-to-day life, until you don't even notice how it affects your mood and daily decisions. No doubt I was developing into a less enthusiastic and more surly person until pain was rather quickly whisked away. I complained during recovery because it wasn't instantaneous, but it was fast enough that I noticed the difference. Now, just two months later, I'm pain-free and back to driving, hand-writing, normal typing, riding my bike, and scrambling class-five rock slabs. I owe it all to CTS surgery. Yay modern medicine.

It also was interesting to quit cycling for four months — my longest break since I a knee injury forced me off a bike for three months in 2007. Cycling is most definitely my "flow" mechanism, and losing that while uprooting everything to move to Colorado was more upsetting than I care to admit. Returning to cycling amid these recent breathing troubles and the stress that causes has been even more disappointing. I find myself avoiding cycling just to avoid the stress. It will be interesting to see where this relationship falls after another month of no cycling, as I'm unlikely to gain access to a bike in Europe.

And now I've spent all these words blathering about my health again, when I meant to write about the two major things that actually happened to me this year — moving to Colorado with Beat, and fulfilling a long-time dream of riding a bike to Nome on the Iditarod Trail. The seeds for this dream sprouted more than a decade ago, and occupied more space in my head than I care to admit. But it seemed impossible then, it seemed impossible every year since, and it seemed the most impossible when I stood at the starting line on Knik Lake. I'd just had too many setbacks in preparation, my training seemed inadequate, I had asthma concerns then, and the crash that left my hand mostly immobilized happened on the first day. That fact that Nome was so impossible, and happened anyway, became a magical experience. The incredible memories from the Iditarod balance out anything negative that happened this year, and then some.

And of course there's Colorado. I'm excited to be here (or there, I suppose, as I'm in Munich right now.) I still dream about returning to Alaska, and I'm not sure that desire will ever go away. But Beat and I are happy to be anchored in Boulder, where we find the best of most worlds — a beautiful place to reside, people who share our values and passions, private space, trail access out our front door, a 25-minute but nicely scenic commute to town, access to good health care, desirable and lucrative work for Beat, mountains and more mountains. I suspect the climate and possibly altitude of Colorado has contributed heavily to my asthma woes, but I'm still optimistic there's a way around all of this. Beat says he doesn't miss the Bay Area at all. I do, just a little, if I'm being honest. We made some great memories there. I miss the trail-running community, and friends, and the redwoods. And I miss Montebello Road — my go-to road bike climb. I want to return to California in November for the 100 Miles of Nowhere. Beat thinks I should substitute Flagstaff Road. But he doesn't understand. It's not the same.

My work is going well. I contract for an Alaska newspaper publisher who recently acquired the Homer Tribune — the weekly newspaper where I worked in 2005-2006. It's a little to surreal to return to the Tribune after a decade, still working with two people I worked with back then, and most everything about it is pretty much the same. Community news is a passion of mine. I believe it's vitally important, even though the tough economics of producing newspapers pushed me out of the business and then out of Alaska. This publisher has made it work, and I'm honored to play a small part. It keeps me connected to community news and connected to Alaska. Someday I will visit Barrow, and Dillingham, and Unalaska ... since I've been editing and sometimes writing about these places for three years now.

And, speaking of the Homer Tribune, the book I wrote about Homer is doing reasonably well. Between Kindle sales, paperback sales, and the Amazon lending library, I've distributed the equivalent of nearly 5,000 copies of "Becoming Frozen" since its Aug. 17, 2015, release. This is the first time I enrolled in Amazon's lending library, and I'm impressed with the program — basically, readers pay a flat rate and authors are paid a small amount for every page read. So it's low-risk for readers, and authors only get paid if people actually read their work. No tricky marketing schemes or $25 hardback duds here. It's the great democratization of the book publishing industry. Yeah, it's probably a good deal for Amazon as well. I still think everybody wins.

I like the idea of aiming to produce a book every year to increase this baseline, which is a bit like having a salmon wheel picking up fish for you when you're not even working. I have a few more ideas for autobiographical projects that may be entertaining enough to snag page reads in the lending library. It's clear I enjoy working in autobiography — not because I think my life is so uniquely interesting or worthy of intensive documentation (although I thrive on intensive documentation all the same), but because as a writer I aim to depict authentic experience. Some writers do this well through fiction, but it's much harder, and that's one of the reasons I mainly read nonfiction. So far, my ventures into fiction have been lackluster, and my efforts with biographical nonfiction have been somewhat frustrating (the book I co-wrote with Tim Hewitt was a great experience. I am having more issues with the Ann Trason project, which I don't really want to delve into right now.) I'm sure I'll branch out eventually, but right now I still have a few more stories to tell.

So, finally, the next book ... it's close to done. My editor has most of the copy and I'm planning on an Oct. 1 release. Here's the working cover:

This book is the about my March 2016 ride across Alaska, and all of those setbacks leading up to it. Thematically, it's a perfect sequel to "Be Brave, Be Strong." I've always wanted to develop a photo book, and I'm finally doing it with this one. It's a full ~70,000-word narrative with more than 200 illustrating photos. Such an endeavor is not super-cheap to produce, but I'm planning to sell the full-color signed paperback for $29.95 directly through my store. This will likely be a limited release, and the retail/Kindle version will come a bit later. If you are interested in pre-ordering the photo version, there's more information at this link: http://www.arcticglasspress.net/agp/?p=216 

So that's my long-winded, jet-lagged birthday update. I'm really looking forward to 37, and if all goes well, more of this:

Thanks for checking in.

Product testing

Date: Dec. 13
Mileage: 10.1
December mileage: 359.4

I bought this coat, oh, maybe two months ago on super clearance from, hmm, probably Backcountry.com. It's an Outdoor Research soft shell coat, and it's ultra light for a winter coat. They only had large. I thought, "eh, I'm not all that small of a person." I really wanted to try it out. It arrived in the mail, and it's pretty much a tent. It's huge.

Still, for a coat that was only about $50, I still wanted to give soft shell a try. Problem is I really haven't seen the right conditions for testing. It's either been too warm or too wet. So when I woke up today to a temperature of 20 degrees at sea level and a wind advisory - 30 mph gusting to 50 mph, I thought, "Oh good, coat weather!"

I also wanted to give my new Arc'teryx soft shell pants a test run, which I've been reluctant to wear while riding my bike for fear of tearing the cuffs. So I set out today for a short ride and long hike in the Hard North Wind.

Pugsley's out sick with a number of problems that I really need to attend to but haven't had time, which is why I've been riding my Karate Monkey so much as of late. My plan was just to commute to the Dan Moller trailhead and hike from there, but I found the snowmobile trail in near perfect condition for snow biking. In fact, the somewhat unique condition of the trail - hard-packed ice with an inch or so of sugar on top - was actually better suited to the Monkey than my Pugsley. The Monkey has deep treaded tires that can dig into the sugar, and studs that grip the ice underneath. The Endomorphs on Puglsey would just wash out on top of the sugar. So I was able to ride a long way up the trail on my 29'er, which was, in its old-school way, quite thrilling.

The sugar became deeper and eventually I had to ditch the bike and switch to snowshoes. After I strapped my pack back on, I inadvertently buckled the waist strap around my Camelbak valve and didn't notice until the front of my fleece shirt was pretty well soaked. My thermometer was already giving me readings in the mid-teens, and I could see snow tearing off the ridge in what appeared to be an intense wind. But since there's always the option of turning around, I thought, "Well, might as well see what this coat can really do."

So up I marched with my soaked shirt and super clearance coat, warmed by the hard effort but admittedly nervous about the arctic blast that surely awaited me at the top. I crested the ridgeline at a moment of relative calm - I didn't know then, but the Hard North Wind was actually an ebb and flow of calm moments followed by intense gusts - and took a minute to pull on my balaclava. While I had my mittens off, I checked my thermometer - 8 or 9 degrees flat - and snapped some pictures. Even in the calm window, my fingers went stiff and began to ache within seconds. Just as the mittens went back on, the gust hit. "Wow" is all I really have to say about that. A blast of white powder came tearing toward me like a fireball in a bad action movie. I saw it coming, and all I could do was hold my mitten over my eyes, look down, and brace myself. It wasn't hard enough to blow me over - so perhaps only in the 50 or 60 mph range. But the wind chill. Wow. I could feel it seeping through my cupped mitten and stinging my face. It whipped around my ankles and needled through two pairs of thick wool socks. But my torso, wet shirt and all, felt surprisingly warm. The legs weren't too cold either.

I stood there about five minutes longer, completely still, just to gain even a small grasp on how I might deal with such a windchill wearing such a coat for a much longer period of time. About three more big gusts came through before I turned around and headed back down. My gloves - lined with down, which I wore all day yesterday and again today - had frozen almost solid where they had been soaked with sweat. Once I was out of the wind, I pulled one off to beat some of the ice away, then reached inside my coat to feel my shirt. It was relatively dry. I mean, for having been soaked with at least a cup of water, not to mention all of my sweat, it felt pretty much dry. Which meant not only was that coat impressively windproof, but it was breathing, and releasing all of my inner moisture back into the cold dry air. Which is all I needed to know. I already have plenty of waterproof clothing. This seems to be a great coat for winter - real winter. If only I could find it in medium.

As far as the raffle for LIVESTRONG contributions, Daniel R. won the Olympus camera. Dan said he lost his father to cancer three years ago, and was really happy about the effort to raise money for cancer research. Alex O., Lisa B. and Richard B. all won books. Two of the winners had one already, but they were still gracious about being the runners up. I'm going to hold a raffle for another book as soon as I figure out Elden's random raffle process. I'll post the winner on Monday. I'm going to continue to hold a raffle for one book every Friday, so keep donating! Your chances of winning will be much better this week. Thanks again to everybody who gave. Donate here.

Also, I had a stack of book orders come in recently and I want you guys to know that I'm going to get those out Monday, so if you ordered in the past few days, you should see your book(s) by Wednesday or Thursday. For everyone else, I wanted to announce that I'm expecting a good-sized shipment on Tuesday, and feel pretty confident that I can get any books ordered before Thursday sent out in time for Christmas (I even grilled a postal worker about this. He insisted that three business days is still the norm.) You know, books make great gifts. (More about the book here.) I always give books to people for whom I otherwise couldn't think of anything to buy. Even if the person on your gift list doesn't like biking, if they enjoy adventure stories or maybe just want a reason to feel better about their own hobbies, they'll probably like it. You can buy signed copies directly from me by clicking on this button. I can ship one, two or three books for $4.80 flat. $9.60 if the shipment is international. I can personalize the signature and ship to any address. Just indicate where you'd like it to go in the message box!

Bookkeeping

Date: Nov. 17 and 18
Mileage: 32.2 and 35.0
November mileage: 510

I felt strong during my two "tempo" rides today and yesterday. My plan has been to ride three or four of these rides every week: two to three hours of semi-uncomfortable effort. But I am almost certainly on a fitness plateau right now, because these rides have become much too easy. I know the obvious answer is "ride harder," but I almost feel like my lungs and heart have outpaced my legs, and I just don't have the muscle power to push the pace much higher. I know I probably do, I just need to find it. And of course there's the short cuts - more intervals, climbing, squats. But there's just so much fun riding out there right now - frozen trails, hardened muskeg, shattery paper ice (see small photo) and dustings of new snow. I keep telling myself I can start building again in December. :-)

I was able to get in plenty of bursts of hard effort today after I snapped the rear shifter cable on my mountain bike. I feel bad for my Karate Monkey; only seven months old, and she's already been through the war. But after riding most of the morning with three speeds (and really only using the middle ring), I have to say, I still don't understand the single-speed thing. It's not a matter of being able to push a high gear up steep hills - that I can do if I have to. But I prefer to have my rotations per minute stay the same no matter how fast I'm going. Single-speeders must have their legs spinning all sorts of different crazy speeds. And once your RPMs drop down to two or three, don't you start questioning the efficiency of your one gear?

Also, I wanted to thank people who have e-mailed me about buying a book. When I made the offer, I didn't really formulate a plan about how I would organize requests and orders and the like. So what I have is an inbox full of e-mails, some of which I have answered, some which I'm not sure, etc. I plan to sit down and organize the whole mess on Thursday or Friday, so if I haven't gotten back to you yet, I apologize. I put in a big order Monday (and I want to thank those who already sent in Paypal payments; it made the prospect of ordering a big box of the exact same book much less painful.) I was told they would take six to eight days to print, so the turnover may be a little longer than I expected. I ordered some extras and can always order more, so if you are still interested in a signed copy or are hesitant to use the direct site, please e-mail at jillhomer66@hotmail.com.

Once I get a chance to really scrutinize and think about it, I may go the route of purchasing a distribution package, getting the book on Amazon and possibly into actual stores (maybe bike shops?). Of course, this would require a ton of marketing on my part, and convincing third parties that it's a worthy product. One of the main benefits of having an outside publisher (besides brutal, thorough editing) is marketing. I'm still not sure whether I want to step outside the safe boundaries of this blog. This was, after all, a personal project and not a commercially-minded venture. More of what I think I might get out of "Ghost Trails" is a learning experience that I can use as a springboard for future projects.

That said, I'm curious if any books have trickled in yet. I'm interested in feedback, any feedback. If you've had a chance to look it over, shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment and let me know what you think. I realize people aren't just going to receive the book and read the whole thing in a day (although it is a pretty quick read), but I just wanted to throw it out there that I'm interested in hearing your thoughts, whatever they may be.

And, just as a friendly reminder, it's still available here. :-)

Finally, I just signed up for Facebook! I still don't know why. Peer pressure, I presume. But that's the whole reason I started a blog, so maybe it will work out for me. My profile.

Book update

I wanted to thank everyone who bought my book recently. I wanted to update you all on the status of shipping, which is unfortunantly not working in my favor right now. My bulk order shipped out on Dec. 6 via FedEx (I deeply dislike FedEx. I believe my bike Pugsley, which once spent two weeks wedged in a corner of the Juneau depot, would vouch for that company's uselessness in this region). The package arrived in Anchorage on Dec. 10, and I have yet to receive it five days later. I've been trying to track it down, to no avail yet. I'm optimistic that if I receive it by Friday, I can still get packages out to people in 2-3 days via the much more trustworthy U.S. Postal Service. Canada should be pre-Christmas as well. Anyone outside of there is pretty unlikely at this point. I'm very sorry about the delay. I will post again if I don't get the package by Friday. I can issue refunds to anyone for whom this might be a problem. Just e-mail me at jillhomer66@hotmail.com. Yeah, I'm bummed about it, too. But I do appreciate all the orders.

In better news, http://www.bikeblogs.com/ named "Up in Alaska" the "Best Cycling Blog of 2009." Much thanks! For those who worry that this blog hasn't been "bikey" enough as of late, here's what I have in store for 2010: Snow bike training, winter overnight bikepacking trips (possible in the Yukon), the White Mountains 100 in Fairbanks, hopeful long summer bike tour, TransRockies mountain bike stage race on a mixed team with a wild Canadian, and more! Remember, It's Not About The Bike ... and yet, it really is.

As for my new book project, I have not made much progress on it. It feels like there are a lot of reasons I've stalled out on it, and writer's block isn't one of them. Every time I sit down at my computer, my head is flooded with images, but I'll just stare at it for a while, close the screen, and start reading one of the many bike touring and mountaineering adventure books I've picked up at the local library. I've found more inspiration in my daily life than I could ever hope for, and yet I can't write it down. I feel like I'm in a deep rut right now, personally, professionally and creatively. The only thing I haven't been disappointed in lately is my photography, and as I've said before, I never set out to be a photographer. I have a hard time taking personal satisfaction in the images I take because they don't feel like mine - they feel like the world's. The world makes the images and I merely observe them. But I guess the same could be said about words.

Digging back through this story I'm trying to write, I noticed a passage in my chapter about my frostbite experience in this past year's Iditarod race. In some ways, it echoes the way I'm feeling right now - not about my toes, but about the parts of myself that are holding me back:

"I pressed my forehead against the cold glass, hoping to numb the pain-seared blood that still coursed through my veins. Every capillary tingled with the reverberations of rewarming. The only parts of my body that I couldn’t feel were my toes. I looked down at the alien digits, nearly consumed by black and purple botches and puss-colored blisters. I tried to wiggle them and they only quivered, like a moldy slab of meat that had been left out of the freezer too long. They no longer felt like part of me. Imposters. Parasites. If I could only work up the courage to hobble into the kitchen, I could carve them off with a butcher’s knife and free the parts of me that still ached to continue the journey. But pain kept me pressed against the window in a cramped building, consumed with a helpless sort of yearning."

Support this blog by buying my book! Signed copies only $11.95 plus shipping.

Streamlining

Date: Nov. 24 and 25
Mileage: 28.4 and 22.1
November mileage: 713.4

The bike training has been going well lately. Really, too well. I've been implementing planned levels of exertion and trying to push myself, but I usually emerge feeling like I'm lacking something. I need to dig deeper. I need rides in which I go to bed feeling absolutely exhausted and wake up pumped for the new day. I need the pain and triumph of a good, long ride. I need the time for a good, long ride.

Right now I have a little time to kill while I wait to pick up my friends at the airport (another delayed flight. Sigh.)We have a pretty low-key Thanksgiving planned, and I'm excited about that. I am sad that I'm missing out on the Homer family extravaganza for which my mother baked nine pies and my sister committed to wearing a special shirt. The day after Thanksgiving, my sister and cousins celebrate Black Friday by standing in line outside a Fred Meyer or Target at some horrific hour of the pre-morning. Then they rush into the store with a stampede of people, trying not to get trampled as they elbow their way into aisles full of what assume are still half-price socks and some sort of $10 DVD players. I've never quite understood the draw, and never participated in the consumer madness, but the images still drum up nostalgia, and I wish I was there just the same.

But if you are like me, and will be spending your Black Friday in the quiet company of friends and hopefully going for a nice long bike ride, you can still get your Christmas shopping done away from the crowds by purchasing the new version of my book! That's right, I fixed some (hopefully most) of the typos, tweaked the fonts, and scoured paypal for a way to sell books directly through my blog. That way, if you would like a signed and personalized copy, you can click on the gold "Buy" button and purchase direct without having to contact me first. (The e-mails stacked up quite a bit, and certainly revealed holes in my organizational skills. If you e-mailed me and I never got back to you, I apologize.) By clicking on this button, you can indicate in a message how you would like your books personalized, and paypal will calculate shipping and total price. You can pay either with your paypal account, or with a credit card. Keep in mind that buying books through this blog means they still have to go through a "middle man" (me) so turnover time will be about 10-14 days. I'm working on generating a specific Web site to better describe the book, including excerpts and reviews, which will hopefully give potential buyers a better idea of what they're getting.

I want to thank everyone who purchased my book so far. Thanks to you, I will definitely be getting that mountaineering coat I've had my eye on. I've also gotten some good and helpful feedback and am continuing to learn a lot.

If you'd like to purchase signed copies of the book, here's the button. I'm going to move it to my sidebar soon. But now, to the airport.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Goals

Thanks to those who sent me nice e-mails and comments after my post yesterday. I really do make an effort to not get too personal with my blog, because I recognize that my boss, distant ex's, and a fair number of strangers peruse it. But sometimes I crave the catharsis of a private journal keeper, and my only real outlet is this blog.

It felt good to whine a little. Now it's time to take action. I was moved by Elden aka Fat Cyclist's latest post, "The Funeral and What's Next." Because the World Wide Web of blogs is in fact a small, tight-knit community, most probably already know that his wife died last week of the cancer she has been fighting for years. Having recently met the man, I was upset by the news, but deeply moved by his strong resolve to move forward. I thought, "If he can find the courage to move on with his life, I certainly can."

So in an effort to avoid flailing around in uncertainty, I've decided to set 10 goals for the near future. Some are quite ambitious and others are more doable, but all are things I find myself thinking about from time to time:

1. Be more focused about my housing hunt. I really need to find a place to live and get settled before I can move forward with much else.

2. Not be so stressed about my personal life: So I've dabbled a bit in the dating scene. It's been a real long while since I've actively tried this. It seems the rules of the game haven't changed much in the past decade, but I haven't really improved in my savvy at following said rules. And I'm a decade older. But I've resolved to just roll with it, and not constantly picture myself in a scene from that movie, "He's Just Not That Into You."

3. Work on a book proposal. I'd love to write a nonfiction book about the history and array of intriguing individual stories behind human-powered travel on the Iditarod Trail. I've been chewing on the idea for two years now, but I'm intimidated by the huge amount of research it would involve, the time it would take, and the prospect of interviewing (and finding) all the people involved. But I believe I could take it on with the both objectivity of a journalist and the insight of an insider. And I do think a compelling book about this tiny niche adventure sport could appeal to a wide audience. It's just too much work to do it "just for fun." Thus the need for a proposal.

4. Plan B, more realistic book project: I would like to create another "Ghost Trails"-type autobiography about the Tour Divide. The problem is, I had somewhat selfish, cathartic reasons for writing "Ghost Trails." I formatted it around issues that would not stop churning around in my head during summer 2008, until I wrote them all down. It's hard for me to think about a new project without viewing it in a similar slant. Maybe that's appropriate. I don't know. It certainly would be good for my mental health.

5. Fall Golden Circle tour: For two years now, I've embarked on a two or three-day bicycle tour of the 370-mile route between Haines and Skagway. I'd love to do that again this year, and I think I may even be able to coax a couple days off sometime in September.

6. Hucker trip to Carcross, Yukon: On my regular weekend, I'd like to travel to Carcross at least once to soak in white-knuckle runs down some really well-built mountain bike trails.

7. Klondike Road Relay: Yes, 'tis the season to make good use of the Alaska Marine Highway System. The relay is September 11 to 12, and involves running (yes, running) 10 or so miles of the Klondike Highway (at a relaxed, "casual costumed" pace.) Jenn, do you still have room for me on your Whitehorse team? I think I can swing it.

8. 2010 Susitna 100: I would love to approach this February race as a winter focus and really try to "race" it. And by race it, I mean not just finish it, but finish it as fast as I physically can. So for this winter, I am going to try to set up training that is more focused on speed and high-effort endurance, as opposed to my Iditarod training, which was focused on survival. I don't want my training to be too focused, though, because this is also the winter I plan to rediscover snowboarding.

9. New bike! By spring 2010, I'd like to be in possession of an awesome new mountain bike, and I'd like to force myself to do the research so that it's as awesome as possible, and I'd like to hunker down in a cheaper apartment and save some of my income so that I don't feel guilty about its awesomeness.

10. Future winter ride across the entire Iditarod Trail to Nome: Ha, ha, just kidding, Mom ... maybe.

The many years of Arctic Glass

The best of "Arctic Glass"

As blogs go, "Jill Outside" formerly "Up in Alaska" url "Arctic Glass" is beyond ancient. On November 3, it will turn seven years old. With the exception of a few friends, family, and my cat Cady, this blog is the only thing that has been a constant in my life for that long. (Even bodies regenerate an entirely new batch of cells every seven years.) It was a snowy evening in Homer, Alaska, when I first launched my blog on a whim, planning to use it to stay in touch with friends in the Lower 48 (this was 2005, the now-almost-unimaginable-pre-Facebook-era.) I figured I would post pretty Alaska photographs once a week or so, and maybe my mom would read it. Arctic Glass has since amassed 1,548 entries, 19,910 comments, 3,317,930 direct page views, and 2,840 Google subscribers. I couldn't even begin to guess how many words and photos fill this space ... suffice to say it's a whole lot. This blog is quite the obese oldster, so to speak.

I never diverged from my original intention for this blog, which is — and only is — a simple online journal. I don't sell ads. I don't publish how-to articles. I don't comment on politics or current events. I don't do gear reviews. I do consider commercial blogs to be worthy ventures, and while I have received many requests and offers over the years, I decided not to venture down this path. Arctic Glass is really just the story of my life — truncated, for sure, due to the content being largely restricted to my chosen theme (outdoor activity), the blog's public status, and my own time constraints. But even with these limitations, this blog has helped me generate a rich and cathartic record of my day-to-day life, which is why I continue to enthusiastically pour so much time and energy into it (even though its sheer obesity means that not even my mom has read the entire thing.)

Still, I believe that some of the content on this blog is worth revisiting. Which is why, under the urging of a trusted colleague, I worked on putting together a compilation of blog posts — the "Best of Arctic Glass." As with other projects amid my adventure-distracted lifestyle, this one took much too long to come together. And while I've been working on designing a photo-enriched physical book that I can actually afford to publish, more and more time keeps passing. Now what started as a "Six Years of Adventure" project is quickly approaching seven. As such, I decided to release the compilation in eBook form, which can be read on Kindles, iPads, or your home computer.

"Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure in Alaska and Beyond" is a collection of 33 essays from this blog, along with short commentary. The main question I get when I tell people about this book is whether any of the content is new. The answer is no. Yes, technically these essays are available for free somewhere on this blog (the key word, of course, being "somewhere." Even I had a hard time finding many of the posts I wanted to include.) What the eBook offers is a succinct timeline, as well as a thorough culling of 1,548 posts to get to the good stuff. Photos are not a prominent part of the eBook, but there are a few. If you're a new reader of this blog and curious about the backstory, or a long-time reader of the blog who missed a few years here and there, I think you would enjoy this book. It's a measly $2.99 on Amazon and iTunes, and your purchase will help me stay gainfully funemployed long enough to finish my other writing projects. Or waste more time pursuing yet more adventures. Hopefully both.

As for the full photo book, I plan to keep working on that. Given all of the adventures I've been trying to cram into the remainder of this year, as well as renewed determination to finish my "A" project before the year is out — it might be a while yet. But for now, you can find "Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure in Alaska and Beyond" at these links:

Amazon Kindle
For iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch via iTunes
PDF and other formats via Smashwords

Tour Divide presentation

Tonight I gave a presentation for our local bike club, Missoulians on Bicycles, at their annual holiday party. My photo presentation highlighted my experiences in the 2009 Tour Divide. I rarely deal in public speaking, so I stumbled through the introduction but loosened up after that.

There was a really good turnout, which was surprising. I was told to take about an hour and ended up blabbing on and telling stories about the photos in my slideshow for nearly two, but no one left and a lot of people complimented me afterward. I had a lot of fun. My Tour Divide presentation and I are available for bicycle club meetings, corporate retreats, motivational conferences and other events as long as travel expenses are covered. :)

I brought a section of the book I am working on but didn't even have a chance to read it. As for that long-standing book project, an independent editor is currently reading through it in order to give me feedback about it. I want to go forward with publishing but not yet sure how I want to go about it. I don't have a lot of time to devote to publishing a book. I'd really just like to jump straight to the book tour part where I could travel around and give slideshow presentations. I should probably cull down the blabbing first. But it's hard to condense a lifetime-in-24-days' worth of experiences into a single hour.