Graveyard of Book Ideas

Yesterday, I polished off my book proposal for my book-in-progress, The Future Wild: A Rewilded World, a Resurrected Bestiary, and Nature’s Next Big Comeback.

Usually, when I think I’m done with a writing project, that means I have at least another six months of work ahead of me, and maybe that’s the case here, but it nevertheless feels like a milestone.

This book idea, like any book idea, requires a lot of investment. Last year, around this time, I spent about $3K to fund a three-week-long 400-mile expedition across Montana’s American Prairie. This past April, I dropped another $3K to fund a trip across depopulated Spain. (I was able to recoup some of that money with Adventure Journal magazine commissions, but there was no net profit and plenty of “Is what I’m doing financially crazy” waffling.) I also spent about $500 to pay for plane tickets and a rental car so I could spend two hours at Colossal Biosciences’ lab in Dallas.

In other words, time and money is being invested in a book project that has a chance of never materializing.

This is nothing new to me. Since my last book, This Land Is Our Land, published in 2018, I have invested hundreds of hours of time in books that never came to be. Here’s my graveyard of book ideas (though I think 1-2 of these might still burst zombie-like from the earth and sit on your bookshelf someday).

1. Get the Fuck Out of Debt Now: A how-to manifesto from two guys who paid off $100,000 in student debt with frugality, ingenuity, and persistence (worked on for about 4 months in 2019 & 2020)

I was thinking of writing this book (we called it GFDN for short) with my friend Josh as a kind of how-to companion to Walden on Wheels. Our thinking was that there really wasn’t any great “how-to” student debt books out there. But this book idea foundered for all sorts of reasons. The Biden administration was toying with the idea of a student debt jubilee. And then COVID happened—debt payments were put on pause. So we weren’t sure what advice should be permanently printed in our book when debt policy could change any minute. Looking back, I think I was thinking that this was an easily marketable book, and a kind of get-rich-quick project that’d be fun to write with a friend. But my heart was never in it. Plus, I was done thinking about student debt, and, anyway, Dave Ramsay has already done a great job breaking down how to structure one’s debt-ridden finances. There’s not much more to say about the subject in a usefully novel way.

2. Becoming Human: A Journey to Live 200,000 Years of our Species’s History (worked on for about a year 2017-2018)

This was one of my best ideas. I wanted to live in five different communities that would represent five different epochs of human history (hunter-gatherer, pastoral, Medeival/craftsman, industrial age, modern). I could thereby simulate time-travel and simulate living the whole of our species existence in a year or two. I pitched this to editors and they loved the idea. The problem was that I just moved to Scotland, just got a fiancee, and just helped said fiancee get pregnant, so this was not the time to be going on a multi-year solo man sort of endeavor. In fact, I wanted to deliberately STOP doing that sort of thing, so I could live a more settled life. Becoming Human was a serious project for a while, though. I sent out about 10-15 applications to get travel grants to help support the journey, but nothing materialized. This was also around peak-woke when I think the publishing industry was taking a break from guys like me, and the journey about a white man jumping in and out of indigenous cultures to share his findings with the world was fast falling out of favor. Part of me still wants to do it though!

3. Out of the Wild: Adventures in Dating, Marriage, and Settling Down (worked on 2019-2024)

I actually have a finished draft of this book, and I think it’s my best word-for-word writing (funny, perceptive!). I pitched it a few agents, and they weren’t interested. I could have pitched another 100 agents, but I think part of me was hesitant because of the private material inside the book, plus I intuited that a memoir about my love life might make it harder to publish more serious things (like a nonfiction “big ideas” book like The Future Wild). Out of the Wild WILL be a book someday, though I need to publish my next few books in a strategic sequence.

4. The Progressive Man: How the Left Needs to Grow a Pair and Win Again (worked on 2025)

This would have been my foray into culture war material. The idea came out of a deep love for who I consider “progressive warriors” (U.S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, John Brown), and I thought this would be an interesting book to write when men were fading from the Democratic Party. The book would serve as a call to re-embrace aspects of traditional masculinity for the modern age, and to remind ourselves how such temperaments have and will continue to have a use within progressive initiatives. I pitched a few agents, but never fully put my heart and soul into the project. And writing about present-day culture war issues just left me feeling… icky. I still have the folder of all my research sitting on my desktop, so there’s part of me not willing to fully say goodbye to this project, as I would love to spend a year or two writing about my progressive heroes. In fact, I have a picture of Grant on the wall above my computer.

Honorable Mentions: I also had an idea called The Consumption Project, which would be a year of radically limiting my household consumption. (ex: All plastic waste must fit inside one mason jar for a whole year, using zero indoor heat, etc.) I got my wife on board, but then we found a builder who could do our renovation project (new bay window, and renovated garage), so it just felt silly to write about consumption when expanding the dimensions of my own home. Plus, I need to be able to fly to see family overseas, so it’s not the time for a fossil-fuel-free life. Additionally, I briefly toyed with a fiction book, which I took immense joy from, but when I realized that this would have to be a 10-year-project and that I’m already financially insecure, I had to set that to the side. If only I had five lives (or five clones) to write all of the above!

Final thoughts

After reading this, I might come across to you as someone who’s fickle, unfocused, and noncommittal. It certainly felt that way sometimes, but it’s better to be gentle and kind to oneself. These were all good ideas AND I had good reasons for not following through with them (no encouragement given to me from publishing industry, finance and family pressures, or just that our world is fast-changing: some topics can be ripe one minute and irrelevant the next). I should also point out to myself that I CAN be focused, as I published my first trio of books in a seven-year-span of joyful productivity.

The Future Wild feels different than all of the above, as I believe it’s marketable, I’m the one to write to write it, it doesn’t make me feel icky, and I would love to devote the next 2-3 years to the subject. We shall see.

The Only Thing There Is to Want by Sarah Hepola (2026)

Phenomenology is a horrible-sounding word for something beautiful: using the particulars of your own experience to form a one-of-a-kind — and yet somehow universal — philosophy of being alive. That is what Hepola accomplishes in The Only Thing There Is to Want. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years, and among the finest memoirs I’ve ever read. Most books feel at least a little like homework to me; it is rare and wonderful when the desire to keep reading overrides every other desire.

Read the book if you want a masterclass in establishing tone. It’s honest, funny, vulnerable, sensual, and full of life. Hepola makes herself lovable not by pretending to be perfect, but by showing us how fallibly human she is.

By the end, I was making notes and voice memos about my own romantic past. The book entertained me completely while also helping me understand my own life—which is about the best thing a memoir can do. A

PS: Sarah was my first guest on my Out of the Wild podcast. Follow her new personal Substack, Love Anyway, by clicking here: Sarah Hepola. Preorder her book here—it comes out in a month!

Reginald Dalton by John Gibson Lockhart (1823)

My good friend David at Acorn Abbey Press has made this old Lockhart book de-extinct, putting it into print for the first time in over 200 years. The author is Scottish and the novel is considered one of the first, if not the first, Oxford novels. Learn more here.

Paid Subscribers get access to another book that’s changed the way I think and deal with conflict, a sneak peak at my next podcast guest (a titan in conservation history!), some content from Claus (the wild cow guy), plus some other good stuff I’m consuming.