02 6 / 2012
Manuscript Submitted!!!
5 years in the making, and it sits on my editor’s desk, in a tiny USB thumb drive. PHEW!
Today, I guess because I’m not sure quite what to do with myself without my book baby, I’ve been cleaning up the trail of half thoughts and half written pieces I’ve left over the years. And in the drafts folder of this blog, I came across a gem of a post from 2009:
I guess I stuck out enough yesterday while reading (and furiously writing notes in the margins of) Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S Spivet—the book I mentioned earlier on this blog about the 12-year-old cartographer/illustrator extraordinaire, T.S. Spivet—to attract the attention of the person sitting next to me at a bookstore cafe. He asked if I was a mapmaker myself and what the book I was “reading/mauling” could possibly be. Yikes.
We got to talking—I think I rambled on about how I’m half in love with the protagonist and half frightened that I so closely identify with him and his need for mapping—and in that tumble of words, I unintentionally proved one of Spivet boy’s central tenets: that maps may be less about explaining the world and more about connecting the world.
In this case, at least, sometime during my awkward blabbing about cartography, that stranger realized we weren’t strangers at all, but old high school classmates. Thanks, Larsen, for drawing a dotted line between two long lost Stuy kids and for leading to one of the best reactions to the project so far:
“Your project…leads me to imagine a future new york in which actual infrastructure has been neglected and people begin to have to use your maps to get around (they’re kept in the map boxes in the subway), and no one really knows how to get anywhere exactly but everyone shares this growing jumble of experiences which guides them.”
Man, that would be great. An alternative guide to Manhattan based on feelings, memories, and associations instead of coordinates. I’m working on it…
Well, Becky from the past, that “alternative guide” is exactly what I hope the book I submitted will be. I can’t believe it’ll be real soon.
23 3 / 2012
…Get Ready!
So here goes: the big announcement that’s been promised, that’s been months, no, scratch that, years in the making… A book collecting 100 of the best Manhattan maps will be coming out next year, published by Abrams (they do such gorgeous art books, I can’t wait to see what this one looks like!), edited by the wonderful Laura Dozier. Ahhhh!
For the next few months, I’ll be alternately holed up in my room writing, choosing the most stunning and poignant and quirky maps, and taking furious notes on the M5, in parks, on benches, trying to capture Manhattan just right in the collection. I cannot wait to have it all come together in a beautiful book, and I’m going to do my absolute best to make sure it does so perfectly.
More details to come (including a surprising little twist for the collection), but for now, enjoy the Cambridge maps that keep coming in and happy spring!
