Although people have been slowly receiving their pre-ordered books in the mail, July 17 is the official publication date of Edible Insects and Human Evolution!  It's been more than five years since its conception and now my book is finally out for the world to see.  

​Friends have been sending me pictures of my book as they receive it! <3

There has been some great online media to go along with the book release.  Each piece has something unique and I think they all work well together to fully paint the picture on what the book's about.

First, NPR covered it yesterday (in print, not audio.. you can read it here).  I had a wonderful conversation with Paul Chrisholm (who has a background in entomology!) and I think the piece turned out great.  I could have done without the photo of bugs hanging out of someone's mouth, but sensationalism is the name of the game with the media, so I can't pretend to be surprised.

Entomofago, which is based in the EU, is the first international media group to focus entirely on edible insects.  They published an interview with me on their blog (available here).  It's a nice little piece that asks a bit more about how I got interested in the topic and why I decided to write a book.

​Lastly, my publisher, University Press of Florida, asked me to write a blog post (here) to accompany the book's release.  They wanted a little bit of a "behind the scenes" feel to the post so I decided to try to show how I work with many different sources of information in order to reconstruct this part of the diet in the past.  

I have some radio interviews coming up and expect there to be some more online articles going around.  I am very pleased with the reception of the book's release.   I am working hard to push away the negative thoughts that this will all change once people have read it!  

I have been "writing" a book for some time now.  Once I got my job at Wayne State, my editor automatically extended the deadline in my contract by a year so that I could take the necessary time to get settled.  This adjustment also allowed me to make negotiations to have teaching release in the upcoming fall term so that I can more fully focus on the book.  The book is also my biggest summer project, so now the real writing is upon me.  It is time to remind myself of all that I have learned about the process and the different mantras that I want to hold dear.

"You already wrote a dissertation.  This is so much better than your dissertation."

• When thinking about how to tackle such a big writing project, I tend to remind myself that I have technically written a book already.  It is then so much better when I remember that THIS book is one I actually want to write.  I WANT this information out there.  I have a bit of an empty feeling when I think about the fact that this book does not exist yet.  This feeling is completely opposite of what I felt when writing my dissertation.  The dissertation for me was red tape.  The results of my research were not exciting, so I had little interest in writing them up.  I truly believe that no results are still results and in the name of science, that is still information worth sharing, but it's not fun  I wanted to share sexy results.  I didn't really have them.  And even the little bits of my dissertation that I was proud of, I wasn't really "putting them out there" until they were transformed and published in academic journals.  Those papers were considerably more enjoyable to write than the dissertation itself.  So now I have this book that is all about how I have personally processed and interpreted all the information out there that I could find on the topic, and I am going to share it with my audience so that I can let them know why I am convinced insects were important in the hominid diet, and maybe by the end of it, some of the readers will be convinced, too.  I WANT this book to exist, and it won't happen if I don't put in the effort.