Kieran's Near-Birthday Newsletter
January 1, 1970
Hi everyone,It's been three months since the last newsletter; you'd think nothing of any interest had been happening in my life. I guess maybe it hasn't ... Anyway, before you all forget about me, here's a quick update to keep you going until the next batch of news.
The Whaling Season: An Inside Account of the Struggle to Stop Commercial Whaling now has an official publication date of June 11. However, that's something of an artificial date, concocted to give magazines plenty of time to write and publish reviews; bound copies of the books themselves should be rolling out of the warehouse around May 1.
By that time, I'll be in Las Vegas, winding down a two-week long visit. The original plan was to go to Vegas for just a weekend, to write some articles about an all-female fight card that was scheduled for April 26. Then I guess I got a little carried away and ended up electing to spend two weeks.
Unfortunately, the fight card was just canceled, so there goes the final semblance of a professional rationale for the trip: I'll just have to spend two weeks having fun in Sin City instead.
I don't yet know the official publication date for Alone, the reissue of Richard Byrd's account of his winter alone in the Antarctic, for which I wrote a new afterword, but I am expecting it to be around the same time. Both books, of course, will be available via amazon.com.
The publicity tour for The Whaling Season is likely to be staggered, with perhaps a few events and media work along the west coast shortly after publication, but more taking place in late August/early September. There'll be an official launch here in Anchorage, at the Cook Inlet Book Company; shortly afterward, I'll probably be going to Berlin for the International Whaling Commission meeting, which apart from anything else will provide some additional hard news hooks for media interviews.
Even with the book finished, there's plenty of work still to do. I'm finishing an article on whaling for BBC Wildlife magazine; about to start work on a chapter on the impacts of climate change in Alaska and the Arctic, for a book on global warming being edited by Jim Motavalli of E Magazine; an article for Conservation in Practice; and proposals for my next two books -- which I hope to sell within the next few months, before I get in trouble for not being able to pay my taxes ...
I don't know when I'll send out the next one of these newsletters. Whenever it is, I can but hope that the world situation will be a lot different than it is right now.
Until then,
Kieran