About the cover photo: It took me three attempts of between 4 and 5 days each to get into the spot where this photo was taken. On the first two trips I suffered some very painful injuries. This spot is in the Baker River drainage in North Cascades National Park. Do you know the name of the mountain?

Converse hightops on my feet, I traverse the North Cascades in pursuit of my life project to walk into every high lake or pond mapped in the Skagit River watershed. The upper Skagit Valley near Marblemount, WA is my home and has been home to my family since 1888. I have come to feel that the culture of this place, like the culture of much of rural America, is misunderstood by an increasingly urban population and threatened by economic depression. I would like to share the stories of this place and the people who call it home. Through my stories and images of these mountains, my goal is to help others understand and respect both the natural resources and the people of the North Cascades.


Tuesday, February 9, 2016

The Book Proposal


I had mentioned previously that I had done a book proposal in 2009 as one final effort to make some kind of living with my photography. It cost quite a bit of money, over $4000, but I wanted to explore this one last avenue before I gave up entirely on making a living with my photography or at least making it pay for itself. I had the thought that it might be interesting to some folks to see what the book proposal looked like. 

The proposal was a sample chapter describing a trip (actually two trips combined in the story) that I did in 1998. The overall idea was to do a book for each year of my high lake project with each chapter in the book being a trip I did that year. I don't recall how many trips I did in 1998 but it was one of my busiest years. So there would have been a lot of chapters in the 1998 book. Other years I made fewer trips so there would have been fewer chapters for those years. 

In looking at this proposal, I cringe at some of the word choices I made and some other small details but I was also hoping to sell the idea and get some editorial help. The graphic designer I was working with was a big help on the layout but as a whole, the thing could use some good editing. 

Writing this proposal was an interesting exercise for me and it opened my eyes to how the mind works and how many memories, no matter how solid they may seem are nevertheless inaccurate. I found that, from the distance of nine years, I couldn't explain how or where I had taken certain photos. It took a lot of thinking to figure these out and with a few I ended up inserting the most plausible explanation. I feel confident that the narration of events as they happened are 90% accurate or better but not perfect. 

The following are PDF files that were converted to JPEGs. It is a bit clunky but it was the best way I could figure out how to display the book proposal in the way it was meant to be. At the current magnification, the text will probably be very hard to read for most people. I found that, if I viewed the pages in full screen mode by clicking on the photos, the text was quite legible. I hope everyone who has an interest in reading this has the capability to view in full screen mode. Good luck. 















































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