The Thai Island & Coastal Directory is fully written. Now what?
A look ahead at putting the finishing touches on this mega-project and moving back into other forms of island and coastal coverage at Thai Island Quest.
Last month, with the publication of a section on Khao Lak and surrounds that completed the Northern Andaman coastal zone, we finally reached the end of the Thai Island & Coastal Directory. Yet there is still work to be done on it, so I want to keep you in the loop on the whats and whens of finalizing this project and moving back to producing other types of articles here at Thai Island Quest.
Now accessible at the Thai Island Quest website via the Table of Contents page, the welcome page and the homepage menu, the TICD as it currently stands is totally ready to use if you’re planning a trip or simply looking to learn more about Thailand’s glorious islands and coastal areas. The current project comes to 142,809 words broken into 64 sections and 7 chapters, plus the introductory material. It’s meant to be perused gradually or piecemeal, perhaps before or during a trip.
Looking ahead, I have quite a few minor tasks to complete before I can call the TICD fully finished and turn it into a proper book. But, at the moment, I’m in the US doing an insane amount of driving work to refill my bank accounts so that I can return to Thailand in August and re-focus on Thai Island Quest while hopefully resuming my travel writing career (and/or related endeavors) full time.
Therefore, I have a choice to make regarding what to do with the limited time that I can devote to TIQ while I’m here in Massachusetts. If I allot it to doing the work that remains on the TICD, much of which is minor editing and other “background” stuff that readers often won’t even notice, then I won’t have time to publish much of anything new other than the monthly Island Wraps.
So I’m going to assume that over the next few months, most of you dear readers would prefer fresh non-TICD articles as opposed to, for example, notices that minor alterations were made in some obscure corners of the TICD.
Therefore, I’ll turn my immediate attention to the livelier types of travel articles and photo essays that this newsletter was originally built on. For starters, I would like to share a few little-known beaches in rural parts of the Northern Andaman that we visited for the first time not too long ago. I also have an article I’ve been working on that shares some of the times when strangers helped me out while I was on the road. I will try get one of these done before the next Island Wrap, although it might get pushed to slightly after that in early May. From there, I expect to squeeze in around 1-2 new pieces every month while I’m in the US.
As for the TICD, I’ll leave it (more or less) in its current form until I return to Thailand and have plenty of time to look under the hood and make the necessary repairs. At that point, and perhaps to some degree before then, I will…
Give the introductory material a solid edit and reformatting, with some new writing in places and probably some rewriting. I started this last week and had expected to add a new intro section on charting Thailand’s mainland coasts, but I found that it would fit better as a handful of new paragraphs within the current introductory section titled, ‘Making sense of ALL of coastal Thailand.’ That section and two others, ‘The many shapes and sizes of Thailand’s islands’ and ‘Geographical terms and trivia’ were written in 2020 when the TICD was still just a dream. I might slice these down into shorter sections, though I’m not sure yet if I’ll do that while in the US or wait until I’m back in Thailand. If before, it will be in addition to the new content explained above.
Add at least two appendixes. One will provide a statistical breakdown of all the islands and coastal areas included in the TICD, and another will essentially be a glossary that simply lists every Thai island and coastal area from A-Z along with links to where in the TICD each of them can be found. This is the kind of thing that is easy but also very time consuming, so it will wait until I’m back in Thailand.
Add or replace a handful of photos for areas I’ve photographed since their TICD sections were originally published, for example parts of Trang province.
Terminology wise, change “offshore islands” to “near-shore islands” to avoid confusion in section titles across the entire TICD. To some titles I’ll also add a few place names to make it easier for you to find islands you’re looking for while only viewing the section titles. For example, the title of ‘Mu Ko Adang & Ko Khai’ will be updated to ‘Mu Ko Adang (incl. Ko Lipe) & Ko Khai,’ while ‘Phetchaburi coast’ will become ‘Phetchaburi coast (incl. Cha-am).’
In every section where the “TICD ticker” appears, replace it with a standard greeting that you’ll find at the top of every section.
Update the publication dates of each section so they always appear in the sequence laid out in the Table of Contents, rather than a sequence based on the dates when they were first published.
At the end of every one of the Intros to each of the coastal zones (for example this one for the Mid Southern Gulf), add links to every section in that chapter so that you can clearly see what’s included within each zone / chapter.
At the beginning and end of every section, add links to the previous and subsequent sections so that you can more easily navigate the TICD from beginning to end.
Draw a new map to go with the Intro to the Eastern Gulf section — that existing map was the first one I made and it’s rather pitiful compared to the others! I’ll also use my camera to reshoot all seven hand-drawn maps of coastal zones in identical light and re-digitize them to remove discrepancies in appearance, which is essential before I can feature them in a print book.
And for the step that will be the most time consuming by far, give every section a fresh look so as to edit, remove any typos, add some new writing in places (particularly in some of the earlier sections that are lighter on background text than sections published later), and clean up the tags and other style elements to for the sake of uniformity throughout.
Lastly something very tedious: remove the periods in “T.I.C.D.” wherever this acronym appears. Why didn’t I go with “TICD” from the start?
Once all of the above is done — and you can be sure I’ve missed some other steps that will need to be taken — I’ll move on to packaging the TICD first into an e-book template and, eventually, make it a print book as well. I have several ideas about how I want that to look and how I’ll go about it. With some luck, I might just be able to get the print version out by the end of the year. How exactly I’ll try and sell it — well, that is a question for another day!
As always, I’ll keep you updated on what’s happening with the TICD and any non-TICD content that’s been published via the monthly Island Wrap.
Thank you so much for being a part of this Thai Island Quest. 🌴
Cheers,
David
Congrats , IMHO should be made into an epub document.
amazing to have watched this grow and finally on its way to being completely wrapped and ready...
BIG Congrats, David...