Not just another Iditarod book

A year's worth of work for the next Iditarod book:  The First 10 Years.

I get to say that because I wrote the first one.
      In 2011 I was approached to join a group of people who wanted to put together a book celebrating the first 10 years of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Those were the days when the goal was as much to get to Nome as it was to win.

When I received that photo today, it made me wonder, how many of us when we pick up a book even think about what went into it from conception to those pages we are reading.  That photo shows where it is today, less than two weeks before it has to go to the publisher. Of course most of it is in the computer, the way publishers want to receive it these days.  Even that has changed in the last 40 years.

Those piles on the table include stories written by mushers themselves, family members, volunteers, villagers along the way and a few by writers who have covered and written about the race over the years.  My small part of it was to write profiles of three of the winners of the first 10 races.  There were only seven of them because one fellow won it three times in those 10 years.

In addition to the mushers, there are profiles of some of the famous lead dogs, profiles of some favorites who did not win the race (see the blog post here about 200,000 miles by dog sled), a history of the trail and of the race, a scholarly account tracing the lineage of the Alaska husky all the way back into the ancestral roots in Siberia, original art work along with period photographs, and probably many other subjects I don't know about.

Through it all a woman named Raine Hall had to beg, cajole, pressure, massage egos, suffer disappointments and persevere in her chore making sure everything was written and organized for the production  Those piles of paper on that dining room table are hers, the result of more than  a year's work with the disparate souls who are writing this book, some of them even now pushing the deadline.  July 1 it is supposed to go to the University of Alaska Press. How long after that it will appear it is anyone's guess; I have not even heard a title yet, but that's all right.  The book will for sure get its fair share of publicity on this blog, so, as they say, watch this space closely.

I just thought considering if you come to this blog you probably read, it would be interesting to open an insight into what goes into that tome you read before it gets to the store or Amazon or wherever you find your reading material these days.