One may wonder why I am blogging so much these days, and why so many book releases are taking place. For reasons that I cannot recall, it came to my attention that the maximum number of titles that I have released in one calendar year is five. That happened twice, and with this email, has now happened for a third time. Never one to leave an autistic goal alone, I decided to go for it and break the record, logically settling on six titles to get it done. While that will likely be met, and possibly exceeded, I ran into another self-created issue: I have a personal view that I “cannot” post two book release posts in a row. For some inexplicable reason, I feel that readers would rather get more of my transcendent, venomous bitterness sandwiched in between, lest they feel that they are being “sold to.” So, the only answer to these seemingly nonsensical rules is to speed up the posts a bit, which will invariably irk someone else into unsubscribing.
“Abstractions of the Alps” is a response to a lesson I learned with my Spanish creative exploits: it is silly to wait until the flights are done to release books about them. There is simply too much beauty, too many adventures, too many stories, and literally, too much of a good thing, to wait so long to put something together. If I were to do a book on, say, “The Alps,” I would wait years and end up not publishing the overwhelming majority of my images. I do not see what purpose that serves.
Thus, this book is basically a collection of things that I find pretty in the Alps, thus far. I did not restrict myself to a geographic list or claim for it to be the “best of” anything in particular. It is variety, beauty, comprehensive coverage, aesthetic appeal, the unusual, the expected, and the unexpected. It is frankly whatever I wanted to put together, which, well, in this crazy year of 2020, why not?
