Well, we made it.

Kait Heacock’s Siblings and Other Disappointments is out in the world, and maybe even at a bookstore near you! It’s been a journey. As a team, we’ve all been grappling with some mixed emotions lately—from the particular thrill of seeing hard work pay off to the melancholy feeling of saying goodbye to an old friend—but what is Siblings itself if not an emotionally complicated experience from start to finish? We continue to be blown away by the positive and personal reactions that Siblings elicits in its readers, including this lovely review from Lauren O’Brien in Shelf Awareness. Though the lion’s share of our work with Siblings is behind us now, we’ll still be keeping up with the book—and with Kait, as she too moves on to new and different things. Keep an eye on Ooligan’s Facebook page and Twitter account for all the updates. (But you’re already following us, right?)

Meanwhile, we’ve started laying plans for the future. The Siblings team is becoming the 50 Hikes team as we get to work on a brand new project. At the end of last year, the press unanimously voted to acquire 50 Hikes in the Tillamook State Forest, a hiking guidebook originally published by the Oregon chapter of the Sierra Club back in 2001. The hikes have all been newly reviewed and vetted for 2017, and we could not be more excited to reintroduce readers to this guide that explores the state forests that we Oregonians are lucky enough to have right in our backyard. Even Portland’s annual January snowpocalypse couldn’t tamp down our enthusiasm for this project, and we’re now back in the swing of things and hard at work deciding what we want this book to be. The team already has tons of great ideas about design elements, marketing efforts, and supplemental content, but the first step, as with any new Ooligan acquisition, will be to take the Sierra Club’s manuscript through developmental editing, working with the original authors to make the text of the book as strong (and, in this case, as useful) as it can possibly be.

It’s sure to be a busy term for us, but we’ve got lots of talent on our team, and a new book is always something to get excited about. Here’s hoping this particular one will also be an opportunity to leave campus and get out into nature once the weather warms up. I’m already planning some field trips. See you on the trails!