The Greatest Explorer of All Time

My agent informed me the other day that my "epic" project - two years in the making - was ready to go to market. He's already sending the completed manuscript to editors and publishers. I have a sneaking suspicion that he has already been talking to them, but he's pretty mum about that kind of stuff. This, of course, is great news, and it comes on the heels of selling my first book to Bloomsbury Children's Books, so things are most definitely looking up.

This good news has injected a pulse of much needed adrenaline into my system. I can feel it mixing in with my creative juices. So I have spent most of the morning printing out copies of maps of every corner of the world. You see, the book that my agent is hitting the pavement with, it's special to me. It's full of adventure and discovery. I wish I could tell you all about it, but I have some constraints right now. I can tell you that it's a story-within-a-story. A famous explorer has found something astounding - something that will shake the foundations of science,  and the holy pillars of all religions, to their cores. Evolutionists will have to start again, and so will the religions. It's back to the drawing boards.

Why the maps? Well, it's like this. The completed book is mostly about the discovery, but it is also about how this famous explorer came to make the discovery. He traveled the world over. In that book, you get a sense for these journeys and adventures, but most of it is specific to the timing and places having to do with the discovery - not the rest of this cool dude's experiences. I have started to write a new book about the explorer's life - a fictional biography, written by his son, a respected archaeologist in his own right. That's where the maps come in. Since most of those travels took place starting in the late 1920's and lasted sixty years, I have a lot of history to get right. For instance, it starts in Africa. Do you know all the stuff that was going on during the time there? Do you realize how the map of that continent has evolved over time? The European powers were still fighting over it: the British, the Portuguese, the French. The explorer also travels to Asia, and right into a pre-WWII mess. In fact, he's in Mongolia when the war breaks out. I could go on, but now you know why I need the maps. They are already hand peppered with the significant world events that impacted each place the explorer visited. The research is daunting, but a ton of fun. So I'd better get back to it.