It’s All About The Book, Now

I’ve blogged about my travels for more than six years and, it’s about time I talked about why I’ve done nothing but travel all this time.

It’s a fair questions to ask: What prompted me to reject retirement in the paradise of Hawaii and become a nomadic, solo world traveler?

What has kept me on the road into my 70s, still traveling, now in my seventh year?

People ask, “When are you going home?” My usual response is that there’s no end in sight to my travels.

Yet I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.

It’s because I’m now fully into the promise of writing a memoir about my life and travels.

Travel’s in semi-pause, now. I’m still on the road, but spending most of my time writing, reading and researching how actually to go about writing a memoir. It’s an especially good indoor project in these cold, snowy northern climes where I chose to spend this winter.

It’s why I haven’t been so busy actually blogging lately. And it’s going to be this way for the forseeable future. If there’s a travel-related post to put on the blog, I will, but I decided those may be so far and few between that I should instead take my readers on my writing journey as well.

So I’ll be writing mostly a lot about what I’m writing, what I’m thinking about, and how this process works. I’ll be working my way through by sharing with you how I’m doing it.

Many questions about travel are the topics of my memoir, the book I’m now working on. It’s a work of creative non-fiction, which means it will be a true story, but clothed in the fancy dress of a story, using the literary techniques that make a story readable and engaging.

At the same time I’m thinking hard about not just what I’ve done recently, but also digging deep into the events of my life that put me in the place where I finally made the decision to hit the road instead of easing into the life of retirement that the arc of my typical boomer life strongly suggests.

I’m studying the genre and reading many published memoirs by others, trying to find the ones that may have similarities to mine, because that’s normally a prerequisite for a formal proposal to write a book that agents and publishers want to see. They want to know what they’ll be competing with on bookshelves if they decide to publish what you submit.

So far I find few male authors able or willing to hit the road and bare their soul in search of redemption and reconciliation for events of the past. So that may be my niche right there. Though I’m still looking. And if any one of you readers seeing this now has a memoir in mind such as the one I’m outlining now, let me know, I’d like to read it.

I’m fully engaged with the proposal process now, examining my motivations, the direction of my life, what brought me here and where am I going with this perpetual travel thing.

My attention has turned from blogging as I roam the world to a focused intent on putting my life all together now before there comes a time when I may no longer be able to.

In short, I’ve begun writing and marketing the book in earnest, and I’m willing to share that with the people who have followed and like reading about what I do.

Thinking seriously about my life, all that’s happened, and the decisions I’ve made both before and since retirement, has brought me one revelation after another. Living life as a solo traveler with plenty of time to think and contemplate things has opened my mind, and kept it open; it has rekindled my recollection of things, given me new insights about what made me tick for 64 years before walking out on the conventions of boomer life and putting myself on the line as a full-time solo world traveler.

These are the subjects of my book. They are the stories of my life and how they have acted upon what I’ve seen and done in the past six years, and as a precursor, perhaps to what happens in the future.

They call it a memoir and I can barely focus on anything else now. I am consumed with reading memoirs, studying the genre, thinking hard about my past, and how it’s all going to fit together with my travels. I’m only at the beginning; it’s another new journey.

Many of you know I attended travel author Rolf Potts’ travel memoir writing workshop in Paris last summer, and I’ve decided to return to Paris in late July for another session. I plan to complete the memoir proposal, approximately 40 to 60 pages, by the time I land in France.

First I’ll be leaving Estonia on Friday, Jan. 27. I’ll spend a few days in Istanbul where I should be able to purchase the COPD medication I need at a reasonable price, without a prescription, then land in Albania where I booked a room in the capital, Tirana, for a month. Albania’s a relatively inexpensive place to live while doing little else but work on my project and I expect to make some serious progress as I have here in Estonia.

Estonia has been wonderful, staying in one of the best accommodations ever. My host Jelena and her son (photo above) have been super and I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly here. It’s been cold and snowy, but all that time I spent inside has given birth to the book. I can’t thank Jelena and Mark enough for making it so comfortable for me to work here. I’m only leaving because my 90-day Schengen visa is expiring this weekend.

I’m not abandoning the blog, but the book is going to be mostly what I talk about for a while. I would hope my readers, my faithful followers, will take an interest in this and follow along as collaborators in this important part of my journey. I’ll keep the newsletter, too, where I suspect most of the best stuff will appear. So subscribe now if you haven’t already.

If you’re wondering about my plan to head to South America and Antarctica, that trip has been postponed. Civil unrest in Peru, which was one of my primary destinations, unnerved me a bit. But also the time and expense, especially of getting to Antarctica, now that my mind’s focused elsewhere, also gave me concerns.

That trip will come another day.