A Bookful of Feathers and Awesomeness

Although this isn't strictly a bird-hunting blog, or even mostly a bird-hunting blog, I know quite a few of you few readers are, and that many of you also read the always ass-kicking Mouthful of Feathers blog. So without further ado...

From the blog...

"A project we’ve been kicking around for some time is finally happening, and frankly, we’re damn excited about it. In early December of 2013, Mouthful of Feathers: Upland Hunting in the West will be released, featuring a collection of original, full-length essays by:

Tosh Brown 
Reid Bryant 
Michael Gracie 
Chad Love 
Greg McReynolds 
Tom Reed 
Bruce Smithhammer 
Bob White 
Pat Wray

The book will be published by Pulp Fly, Ltd. and available on Amazon, iTunes and Barnes & Noble for Kindle, Nook and iPad platforms.
More to come soon – please stay tuned. And if you haven’t done so already, the best way to stay tuned is by signing up as a follower of this blog, which you can do on the menu on the right side of this page, and by “liking” our Facebook page. Thanks."

I'm pretty damn excited to be a part of this project. It's a perfect example of how small, independent publishers with vision and moxie are identifying and exploiting important niches that big, ponderous, arrogant, floundering, clueless corporate media companies are simply too slow, too myopic, too stupid, too timid, too conventional and above all too least-common-denominator to even understand or recognize, much less try to explore themselves.

I think MOF has always been a great example of a specific vision realized, the kind of vision that traditional corporate media types just don't get. When I first started writing the gundogs blog for Field & Stream, I tried, mightily, to convince my editors to just let me run with it, to reject the conventional and stupefyingly boring, the formulaic, the homogenous, the carefully branded and SEO-driven. I didn't want to write bland, predictable, unappealing pap, because I knew there was an entire subculture out there, an entire demographic, that F&S had lost, and I sure as hell wasn't going to get it back for them with caption contests, forgettable and mostly useless how-to posts, and risk-free writing assiduously scrubbed of voice, opinion and edge.

In short, I wanted something loosely based on MOF, a hybrid, freeform, freewheeling, unpredictable, opinionated, edgy, but always entertaining and well-written blog that didn't look, sound, read and feel like just another carbon-copy branded product. Round hole, meet square peg. To their credit, the editors took a chance and sometimes allowed me a little room to riff, but what I wanted to do just didn't jibe with what they wanted to do, and for the most part, even I admit it was an unmitigated failure that was rightly shot down.

The fact is, there just isn't any room in the conventional hook-and-boolit world for what MOF is, what it represents. Not everyone gets it. Not everyone is supposed to get it. And that's a damn good thing. Who wants to be all things to all people? That's just weak sauce designed to maximize profit and minimize originality. But damn it, you'd better get it. Yes, you. Both "it" as in the vibe, and "it" as in the book. I'm confident, however, that you'll get it. Both "its". Why else would you be reading this weird-ass blog if you weren't already a little different, right? 

Now I'm not saying this is going to be better than anything else out there (but it is...) but it's damn sure going to be different than anything else. And I for one think there are a lot of people out there who are craving something different. They're tired of Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes. Maybe they want to try an interesting new curry. And that's what the MOF book is; a good curry, a spicier, more exotic alternative to that comfortable, boring-ass Salisbury steak.

All I'm saying is, you should try this curry. It's tasty.