Today, I’m pleased to make two exciting announcements!
As of this post, I have made the bittersweet decision to officially conclude my long-running travel blog. I honestly didn’t expect to keep it going for the duration that I did; I figured I would pen maybe a half-dozen essays or so and then lose interest, or maybe fall too far behind to catch up. But, thanks in large part to the positive feedback from all of you - my friends, family and a surprising number of complete strangers, I kept at it. Every penned essay reminded me just how much I used to enjoy creative writing in school; the problem, though, was that I could never motivate myself to keep it up outside of class. I felt like I didn’t have much of a story to tell. But my road trip changed all that. It gave me not only a reason to try a new creative experiment but, more importantly, it gave me the confidence to find my voice.
One year and twenty-nine posts later, I think I can safely say that the experiment was an overwhelming success. Not only did I stick it out but many of you stuck with me as well. Time and time again, folks told me how surprised they were that I was such a talented writer. It surprised me, too - I’d never thought about my writing as being anything more than a physical account of how I think or how I speak; it was just my personality on paper, simple as that. It didn’t seem to me to be anything exceptional. Plus, I considered each of the travel essays to be a rush job, limited in their prose and polishing by the constraints of living on the road. But with every word of praise, there also came a repeated suggestion: “Have you considered writing a book?” What? No, of course not. Never in my life had I considered that. Other people write books, not me. But it got me thinking.
And then, of course, the accident happened. Everything about my life was flipped on end, right down to the car I was traveling in. Suddenly, my story had a climax. Then, a few months later, when I finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest, it had an ending. My story had a clear narrative arc, fascinating characters and locations and the emotional draw to keep a reader interested. Somewhere along the way, it even found a willing narrator. I decided that I needed to at least try to tell my story in full.
A few years ago, a friend introduced me to an online creative writing project called National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo” for short. Along with thousands of other participants around the country, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word (minimum) novel in a single month - November. The finished product is rough and sloppy, full of plot holes and incomplete thoughts; the point, though, isn’t to have a ready-to-publish novel. No, the point is simply to turn “I’d like to write a book one day” into “I have a physical rough draft of a book sitting here on my desk staring me in the face.” It’s not a contest in the sense that you’re racing other writers. You “win” NaNoWriMo when you manage to successfully reach the 50k word goal in a month. That averages out to just shy of 1,700 words a day.
Not long after I arrived in Tacoma, I started preparing for a new experiment. From the seven hand-written journals that I kept while traveling, I distilled over 100,000 words-worth of notes down to a narrative that would work for a novel. From this 125-page narrative, I condensed it even further into a clean, chapter-by-chapter outline using a piece of software called Scrivener specifically created for story design. Then, I got to work.
At the time of this writing, I have about 40,000 words already (some pulled from my blog posts, some brand new) with the goal of reaching at least 90,000 by the end of November. It’s an ambitious goal to be sure and one that I may very well not reach but I feel that I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t give it a shot. So many unbelievable things happened in the last year and I only had time to address a fraction of them in my blog (which, unfortunately, didn’t include any of the fun NSFW stories, of which there were many). Yes, this novel will absolutely go there. And don’t worry, I’ll change your names for privacy (you know who you are).
So with the conclusion of one project, I begin another. It may be a year or longer before I have something that’s even remotely ready to share (or even - gulp - publish) but, with a little luck and a lot of diligence, I hope to have the complete bones of a novel before the end of the year. And honestly, how crazy would it be to say that, in one single year, I managed to travel over thirteen thousand miles across thirty states, almost die halfway through, and then still find the time to write a book about the whole thing?
Yeah, that sounds exactly like my kind of crazy.
CWO