The Secret World of Red Wolves

Yesterday I came home from the Science Writers 2012 conference in Raleigh, N.C. feeling very good about seeing many old and new friends. Despite dealing with the travails of traveling as a nursing mom without her baby, it was an awesome trip. But even more awesome awesomesauce was awaiting me at home. Lurking in the middle of my stack of mail was the new UNC Press catalog for their spring/summer book releases—and gracing the cover is a large, handsome red wolf, a nice nod to the upcoming release of my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves next April! (Click here to download a partial PDF of the catalog and read more about the book.)

I am thrilled the press chose a photo from my book to put on the cover of their catalog! It is a wonderful gesture to their faith in the importance of this book, and it is also a welcome bit of positive news for the red wolf which is currently plagued by the fallout of a decision by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to allow the night spotlighting of coyotes throughout the state, even within the endangered red wolf’s five-county recovery area. For this, they are being sued. (I first wrote about the threat of this change to the state hunting regulations for the Scientific American Guest Blog, and for the Charlotte Observer, and I’ll be writing more about it elsewhere in the coming month.)

The photo on the catalog cover is also the photo for my book cover, which will look like this:

Now, is that a nice cover or what? I love the way they framed the wolf’s gaze with the title.

But back to the catalog. This is the first step in marketing my book, and that makes me very excited because I actually finished writing the book in November of 2011. At the time, I had no idea that it would take more than a year for the project to transform into a saleable hardback form! (In fact, the process took so long, I actually went through pregnancy and birth and now have a beautiful baby boy! Some people have commented that it must feel pretty good to have a book and a baby both “born” within the same year. It does feel good, though also a tad overwhelming as I try to regain my foothold with writing now that my life is re-centering around another human being.) Because of my recent inauguration into motherhood, I’ve not been blogging much the past few months, but I hope to rectify that situation in the months to come. Goodness knows there is so much to write about with recent developments for the worse for red wolves.

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Book writing: lessons learned (the revisionist version)

Image from Wiki Commons

Last November, when I sent my book manuscript off to my editor at the University of North Carolina Press, I heaved a sigh of relief that that was finally done. After more than two and a half years, I’d fostered my idea for a book into an actual book manuscript. Waiting for his feedback, I felt like a kid anticipating Christmas morning! It was, of course, an immense relief to hear that his first reading was positive with only a few minor and completely right-on suggestions for sharpening both my craft and the tale at hand. (I think it’s safe to say my book will be the most complete history of red wolves that has ever been published. Visit these links for other posts I’ve written about the book and lessons learned.) But I didn’t get only his feedback… about four months later I found myself in possession of three different external reviewers’ comments. The press had asked a literary expert and two scientific experts to review my manuscript. I was then given a few months to incorporate their comments into the final draft.

… And that is what I’ve been up to for past eight weeks! At first it was incredibly difficult to drag my mind back into the depths of the red wolf’s story. I chiseled away at the easy edits first, things that required only word changes, or sentence- or paragraph-level tinkering. That helped me get back into the groove of the writing and the story arc. When there was nothing small left to twiddle with or smooth over, it was time for the heavy editing. I made a checklist of the more substantial edits and figured out a game plan for how to attack them.

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Book writing: lessons learned

Like the young red wolf pup shown here, I had a lot to learn. (Photo courtesy of the Red Wolf Recovery Program, FWS. Here, Ryan Nordsven takes a blood sample from a red wolf pup, a routine procedure to test for genetic purity.)

As promised in my last post, I’ve pulled together some of the “lessons” I learned about the process of writing a non-fiction book while writing my first one, The Secret World of Red Wolves: A true story of North America’s other wolf. The process of writing a book is surely as different for every writer as the fingerprints inscribed on our digits. What follows below is a list of things I learned along the way, over the two year process it took to bring my project from an idea to a finished manuscript. (The focus of this post is on the actual writing, structure, and organization issues I encountered—not how to write or sell a book proposal.) I don’t expect that what I’ve shared here will make sense to everyone, but if you’re a writer who is struggling to tackle a big project then perhaps some granule of this discussion will help you to tackle your own project in a new, productive way.

Approaching the writing: Knowing enough to know where and how to start

I planned for my book to be somehwere around 87,000 words (it topped out at 95,000), but before embarking on this project I’d never written anything longer than 4,000 words. Which might explain why I started out with lots of questions about how to organize and approach a writing project more than twenty-one times larger than anything I’d ever done. Seeking guidance, I asked two non-fiction authors I know (who had published multiple books each) how they had managed to break down the massive amount of work involved in writing multiple chapters. They are both journalists, and each told me that they simply treated each chapter like an in-depth article, and then stitched all the “articles” together. That sounded like a manageable way to tame what seemed like an unruly mess of ideas in my head, so that’s how I tried to conceive of my chapters. I stared at my draft table of contents and thought, This will be easy! I’ll just write seven or eight “articles” about these ideas. 

After bungling around for a few months and feeling stuck each time I tried to write the first “article,” I realized that their method didn’t work for me. I couldn’t conceive of the chapters as isolated articles linked by the theme of the book. I could only see the continuity between the chapters I’d outlined, although I couldn’t yet clearly envision the narrative path I wanted a reader to take through the story. I knew I wanted to plant seeds in the first chapter that would be cultivated and tended to in later chapters, but this was hard to do in the sense of writing an article. I realized with a sinking feeling that in biting off writing the first chapter, I first had to have a much firmer understanding of the whole book — the whole story — before I could understand where it began.

What followed was three or four months of intensive research and interviewing, more notes than I knew how to handle, a mind jammed full of red wolf facts, and a dozen or more stacks of research papers and documents carefully grouped by topic on my desk. I felt adrift and anchorless in those months. I often awoke at 3 a.m. with a hard, cold fear in my belly from knowing that after four months of “working on the book” I still had yet to finish a single chapter.

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My first book: The Secret World of Red Wolves

Captive male red wolf at Sandy Ridge facility, near Columbia, North Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Nordsven, red wolf biologist with USFWS)

It’s been exactly six months since I posted on Wild Muse. What have I been up to since then? I finished my first non-fiction book! (No, really! It’s done!) It’s tentatively titled The Secret World of Red Wolves: A True Story of North America’s Other Wolf. Writing this book is a singular accomplishment in my life. If you’ve read this blog, you’re probably familiar with the book’s topic. But if you’re not familiar, then here’s a quick recap: it’s a story of the red wolf, Canis rufus, which is a predator that used to live throughout the central and southeastern United States. It’s a contested species, and its taxonomy has been elusive. Some people don’t believe it’s a wolf at all. Others believe it opens a window to a lineage of wolves that evolved solely in North America. If you’re opening another browser tab to look it up on Wikipedia, take the entry with a grain of salt, it needs improvement and the sections on its taxonomy and origins appear to be largely authored by the camp of people who disbelieve the animal is a distinct entity, without much coverage of opposing views. In the book, I cover the full spectrum of these views, in the context of how our understanding of these animals has changed as science uncovers new clues to their past origins.

Oddly, a modern detailed treatment of the red wolf’s whole story has not been told all in one place before for a general audience. The idea for this book came to me after I moved to North Carolina in late 2008. The Old North State is home to the only wild population of red wolves in the world. They have been reintroduced to the eastern part of the state, in a coastal area known locally as the Albemarle peninsula. When I moved, I knew from my previous research on Mexican gray wolves that a red wolf program was underway in North Carolina, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. In my literature review of Mexican wolves, I’d also bumped up against several papers on red wolves for which I read the abstracts but didn’t have time to read more. I filed them away for investigation at a later time, but they left me with the lingering impression that there was something controversial about the red wolf’s origins and our current understanding of its genetics.

When I finally had some free time, I searched for an in-depth non-academic book to learn about red wolves, but I was surprised I could not find a current one. The most recent one for general audiences is actually a section of a book from 1993— and believe me, a lot has transpired since then. Other recent books were written for children, or were fairly superficial and did not address any of the evolutionary origin or genetic debates that I knew had cropped up about red wolves since the mid-1990s. Writings that addessed the red wolf’s genetics and taxonomy were relegated to academic chapters within other works, and scientific papers. Without truly understanding what I was getting myself into, I began to form the idea that perhaps I should write a current book about red wolves. Afterall, I love learning about predator ecology and conservation. What could go wrong? (Well, for one thing, I didn’t know how to write a book!)

After a few months of research, I wrote a book proposal and sent it to a few university presses. The University of North Carolina Press accepted it in November of 2009.

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