Killing Batteries

In February, Killing Batteries celebrated its sixth birthday. It occurred to me that I should post something back then, but I didn’t because, while I had many things to say, I couldn’t ignore the fact that ultimately I had no point. And “What’s Your Point?” is high on my top 10 list of travel blogging pet peeves, right below “Obvious Shilling” and “Are You Really Too Busy to Proof Read?”

“This Is Unspeakably Stupid” is up there too, but it jumps around depending on my mood.

Also, regrettably, no matter how I arrange the words, this post makes me sound like a narcissist, even though I’m about to spend several paragraphs tuning up lesser deserving narcissists. But hey, if knowing beyond a doubt that I’m better than other narcissists makes me seem like a narcissist, then I don’t care what you think.

[Pause for you to enjoy the exquisite phrasing of the previous sentence.]

At best, six years is a middling length of time in real life. If I hear someone has been doing something for six years, I might raise an eyebrow. I’m especially loath to give people credit for longevity these days as everyone’s idea of noteworthy experience has shrunk to the length of a beer fart and job intervals on résumés are measured in months instead of years.

That said, six years in travel blogging looks and feels like several dynasties. The evolution from occasional journaling with maybe a few pictures to the 24/7 multimedia, multi-channel deluge has been dazzling. I’ve watched people that started out as commenters at Killing Batteries become travel blogging all-stars. And I’ve watched people who started commenting on their blogs become huge as well.

By these standards, I kinda feel like one of the granddads of travel blogging. And if, like me, you include the exhaustive HTML-based travelogue I maintained from 2003-2006 in my travel blogging resume, I’m elevated to being one of travel blogging’s great granddads.

(For you timeline fans, I know of at least two people who are still around that pre-date me by several years, making them the Methuselahs of online travel publishing.)

So, while Killing Batteries may have peaked around 2008/2009 and, due to my focus on paying work (or laziness, you pick), slowly faded from relevance since, I nevertheless often feel like one of the old folks sitting in a rocking chair on the perimeter of the travel blogging town carnival, watching the swarm of young and energized bloggers – some doing hand stands and back flips, while others are hitting each other with plastic bats and accidentaly detonating firecrackers in their hands.

With that self-indulgent vision established, here are the impressions/wisdom I’ve collected over nine years of online travel publishing.

Presentation and outreach have gotten way better, which is a relief since content and self-promotion have generally gotten worse. As I’ve moaned before, the quality of the actual writing part of travel blogging appears to have peaked early. Whether this is due to the staggering increase in travel blogger numbers and the crappy writers are proportionately more noticeable or if content has suffered due to the longstanding SEO cultivation versus quality debate I don’t know. All I know is that, even with my judiciously maintained blog subscriptions and Twitter feed, I am still routinely faced with noteworthy awfulness.

Then there’s the exasperating false sense of entitlement (“I’ve been blogging for six months! Where’s my book deal?”), which heartbreakingly transitions into the blind and unearned solicitations for credibility and ‘likes’, skewered recently in brilliantly timed fashion by The Oatmeal.

Admittedly, I’m feeling extra dour, having read an unusual number of craptastic blog posts in recent months. Even with so many people volunteering so much blogging advice (which we didn’t have when I was your age, kids), many posts still have that grade school “What I Did for Summer Vacation” whiff about them. Tedious, babbling, starved for evocative language, and riddled with typos. And not the little, forgivable typos that we’re all guilty of. I’m talking the whiplash, ankle-spraining, nose-breaking typos that a 9-year-old would notice from across a room while simultaneously playing Wii Tennis.

Another plague to the current state of travel blogging, indeed perhaps the greatest myth propagated by self-appointed travel blogging experts, is that posting frequently is one of the main keys to success. If you legitimately have strong, thoughtful topics two or three times a week, then by all means, post away. But you’d be the first in the history of travel blogging. Instead, what we get is deliberate, wearying gratuitousness.

A well-regarded, popular blogger recently reiterated this fallacy to my dismay. Someone who, coincidentally, I unsubscribed from a while back due to the fact that 2/3 of their posts felt forced and unrewarding. The bloggers that wake up and think “Oh shit, it’s Thursday, I have to write a blog post,” are doing their readers a huge disservice. If you have nothing inspired or compelling to say, then please, for the love of Buddha, don’t go to your desk out of some misplaced sense of obligation, look around the room and proceed to write an “I Love Lamp” blog post. That’s how readers become skimmers and in some cases then become ex-readers.

I Love Lamp on Vimeo.

Having vented all that, I have to grudgingly admit that I’m apparently wrong. People guilty of these infractions still somehow manage success. Notorious tone-deaf, grammar-spazs and halfwits; gratuitous posters, shills and poseurs; people that have shamelessly embraced their narcissism (rather than only tolerating it, like I do) have won baffling acclaim and lucrative collaborations.

While opining on this mind-screw, an observant colleague pointed out that part of the wide ranging discrepancy about who thinks what is best for travel blogging is that travel bloggers (and their readers) can kinda-sorta be dropped into two categories:

1.    The people that started out as writers
2.    Everyone else

Both categories have produced great travel bloggers (and terrible travel bloggers), but the people that inspire the most severe garment rending are usually from the ‘everyone else’ category. For whatever reason, this group is heavy on the ex-marketing types, corporate escapees, self-styled entrepreneurs and folks under the impression that they’ve collected an entire lifetime of wisdom by age 26, then feel compelled to don their Captain Profundity helmets and advise others with dangerously misplaced authority. For the same reason that I don’t recognize or understand the nuances from their perspectives, they seem oblivious or dismissive of tone, structure and/or even a passing attempt at creativity – failings that scream out at me every time I (don’t) see them.

Then there are the ones who won’t (or can’t) proof for basic grammar. I don’t even know what to say here. One hesitates to disparage people who genuinely, for whatever brain-wiring reason, can’t recognize proper grammar. But it seems that the people guilty of this are more often than not brazen SEO whores looking to pad page views rather than write something readable that might earn and keep a dedicated audience, making it difficult to summon any sympathy.

And I should remind people here, I’ve never taken a writing class. I don’t really know any of this stuff myself – at least not well enough to explain or teach it. That I’m simply writing by ear and these writer shortcomings are still so painful to my eyes means that properly trained writers (and, more importantly, editors) must be routinely reduced to tears when trolling travel blogs.

So, who should existing and new travel bloggers listen to? The disappointed, wistful great granddad or the easily impressed, circle-jerk kids?

Disclosure: That even on my best day, my book reviewing skills are amateurish notwithstanding, I am good friends with Doug and have therefore opted to skip doing a book review in favor of an only sporadically serious interview on his travels and scoring his first book, Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day.

With the impressive thoroughness of Doug’s replies, I’ll elaborate no further on our tumultuous history, filled with grudges, scars and tinted-windowed van abductions, and launch straight into the far more illuminating interview itself. (NOTE: This is the Collector’s Edition of the shorter, less goofball interview that appeared on World Hum last week. Go there if you’re pressed for time or hate mirth.)

Killing Batteries: What came first, the Five Wrong Turns hook or the resolve to pursue a book deal?
Doug Mack: The hook. I mean, I’ve always liked the idea of writing a book (or, more accurately, to have somehow written a book without actually putting in the effort), but, truthfully, I had never thought about it in tangible terms—it was sort of an idle, unpursued dream rather than a burning ambition. But when I discovered that 1963 of Europe on Five Dollars a Day and first looked through my mother’s letters from her days as a hippie Grand Tourist, that changed in approximately 2.4 seconds—it was one of those light bulb-over-the-head moments that happens in movies but not in real life. BOOK. MUST WRITE.

KB: How old were you when you landed this book deal?  
DM: I was 29 years old. Younger than Mozart when he got his first book deal, younger than Hemingway when he wrote his first symphony.

KB: How much ass did that kick?
DM: Honest answer? Okay: it kicked major ass. I still have a stupid grin affixed to my face (embarrassing as it is to admit). And that’s because I still kind of can’t believe it happened and I’m well aware of how lucky I am—I’m waiting for someone to jump out from behind a bush and point and laugh and say it’s all an epic prank and how could I not notice all the cameras this whole time … but until then, I’m just going to keep this dopey, delighted look on my face.

KB: Having seen so much of Europe now, I have to ask, are you now or have you ever been a dirty socialist?
DM: Yes. Spending time in Europe brainwashed me into believing in the central tenets of dirty socialism, namely, universal health care and widespread availability of gourmet pastries.

KB: These days, it’s tough to get an agent, never mind a publisher, to give you a second glance without an already impressive platform and readymade audience. So, how the Bachmann did you do it?
DM: It’s amazing how far your can get with a little blackmai—I mean, with an interesting hook and a lot of stubborn persistence.

Part one of that: The book has an obvious gimmick (touring Europe with a 1963 guidebook), but it  uses that quirky hook as an entry point into in something larger and more earnest—namely, a big-picture discussion of the social history of tourism in the last generation. Plus, there’s the personal-history element of following in my mother’s footsteps. So there are a number of different angles, but they all tie together—which, I hope, adds up to an interesting hook and, therefore, and interesting book.

The book is also a bit of a spoof of classic travel-memoir tropes: I’m not trekking across a desert, I’m not learning tradition crafts in a forgotten village, I’m not seeking enlightenment or the wisdom of the ancients. This is manifestly not My Year In a Quirky Sun-Dappled Village With Eccentric Locals. Instead, I’m a clichéd tourist through and through (and, in the process, attaining my own skewed version of enlightenment-or-something). And I think that for once, being  absurdist and contrarian actually helped by setting me apart and creating what I hope is an amusing, insightful remix of the standard travel-memoir formula.

So the hook helped. And then there’s Part Two: becoming a workaholic, stubborn, asocial hermit. Just kidding. Mostly. I researched and hustled—that is to say, read wearying numbers of web sites and books with titles like How to Write a Book Proposal in 972 Simple Steps!!—and wrote a proposal and got rejected by a dozen agents and kept polishing and pitching and failing and failing (repeat another dozen times), but trying to, as Samuel Beckett so wonderfully put it, “fail better.” I can’t pretend that I have some magical formula for any of this, but, eventually, after all those months of fail-tweak-fail-tweak, an agent gave me a chance and took me on. The whole process was a combination of lucky breaks and just struggling through, putting in the hours.

KB: Best place for doughnuts in Europe?
DM: Not Amsterdam, I’ll tell you that much.

KB: When you’re famous will you remember the little people that, say, proofed an early draft of your book, let you sleep on their hotel room floor one time in Vancouver and interviewed you just before the book came out to help spark promotion?
DM: The who? Just kidding. Yes, of course, of course. But I thought we agreed not to tell anyone else about that tanker of Strongbow you demanded as remuneration.

KB: [Toweling off from Strongbow bath] What with your love of aerograms and postcards, you appear to be an old school travel aficionado. What three things would you change about modern travel or the travel industry?
DM:
1.  End checked-bag fees. I don’t really mind some of the other additional charges that have popped up. For example, lack of free meals on shorter flights—okay, fine, charge extra for that. Besides, I’m just going to bring something from fresher and tastier from one of the terminal restaurants or from home. But baggage fees? Come on. That’s asinine. Nearly everyone travels with some sort of luggage, and it’s all getting on the plane somehow. So don’t encourage people to carry on even the biggest bags and hold up departure while they try to shove their taxidermy elephant into the overhead bin.

Incidentally, guidebook author Temple Fielding, one of Arthur Frommer’s foremost predecessors and competitors, had his own method for gaming the baggage-fee system. In addition to his two regular suitcases and oversized briefcase, he also traveled with a large raffia basket (full of his luxury-booze stash and a portable record player, among other things). The airlines didn’t know how to categorize the basket (“Well, sir, I don’t even know what raffia is, so we’ll just pretend we don’t see it”) so they didn’t charge him an extra-bag fee. But you’ll have to read the book for the rest of that story.

2. Make digital devices not work abroad. Consider this a modest proposal to help those of us want to be fully immersed in place but can’t seem to find the off button on our electronics: mandate that all phones and computers not work—at all—when transported out of their home countries. Force me to pay for time on an Apple IIE with a mangled keyboard at an internet cafe or to make calls on a tinny pay phone or, God forbid, to talk to a local if I want information.

Not really, of course. I want people in any given place to have the same access to digital communication, and all the benefits it brings, that I do in my home. And I want all of those benefits for myself, the visitor, as well. But there’s a point at which communication-addiction is detrimental to the travel experience—I know, I’ve been there, I’ve wasted (and that is the word) countless hours on mindless internet-hopping and status-updating, pulled away from the people and sights and sounds and culture and language of the place I’m visiting. This even happened during my trip (I talk about it in the book), a trip that was in large part a rebellion against information-overload and an embrace of old-school ignorance and reliance on wits and serendipity. Yet I still got the internet-withdrawal shakes. So maybe I need some help.

3. End the snobbery. Last winter, here in Minneapolis, there was a light rail train wrapped in a huge ad for package tours—golf, shopping, the usual—to Mexico. The main slogan, in foot-high letters: “Mazatlan for travelers not tourists.” Does that expression mean anything anymore? On the first page of my 1963 guidebook, Frommer says that it’s a book “for tourists”; he doesn’t use the word with irony or as an insult, he’s just calling them precisely what they are. There should be no shame in that (as Evelyn Waugh quipped in 1934, “The tourist is the other fellow”–someone else,  not you).

Tourism has always been, to some degree, an act of status, a statement that you have the time, money, and ability to go abroad. With the budget travel boom of the 1960s, though, it exploded and fragmented, open to more people and more ways of showing off, including not just conspicuous consumption but conspicuous frugality. Today, specific travel attitudes and methodologies are as carefully calibrated as attire worn on a first date. Which is absurd. It’s absurd when it means visiting only the most famous cities and landmarks, strictly hewing to the instructions of the latest Frommer’s or Lonely Planet. It’s equally absurd when it means avoiding cities or landmarks for the sole reason that they’re popular. The net effect is the same, an attitude that views travel as a collection of merit badges to be earned, then flaunted: Saw This, Did That, Stayed at the Four Seasons, Slept in a Ditch.
But each attitude completely misses Frommer’s essential underlying point: what matters is not finding something your friends haven’t found but appreciating and understanding that thing—that culture, that place, that food—on your own terms. You can be close-minded even off the beaten path; you can discover all kinds of interesting and wonderful things even on the most tourist-swarmed landmark.

4. Bonus demand: Free. Public. Restrooms. This isn’t specific to modern travel, but it’s still something that I’d change, if only anyone asked me. Especially in places like train stations and restaurants. Everyone, at some point during the day, will need to use a toilet. As a matter of public health and basic human decency, do not make us pay for them. It is a scientifically proven fact that a full bladder is all it takes for even the most staunchly anti-globalization, anti-capitalism individual to rejoice at the sight of a McDonald’s –and its free, clean washrooms—abroad.

KB: At their respective physical peaks, who’d win in a fight between Arthur Frommer and Tony Wheeler?
DM: Rick Steves.

KB: How many guidebook authors does it take to change a light bulb?
DM: Just one, but only after hours of exhaustive research. And all the internet commenters will complain that it was done incorrectly—and that, really, you can just use Twitter for that now.

KB: If you were going to do this trip all over again using modern resources, what would you rely on most?
DM: I would at least glance through a modern guideboook and phrasebook so that I could have a better understanding of the basics of how to understand and get by in a given place and culture. I would also use Twitter or other social media to try to make connections with locals before I left (and those people could also have helped me understand more about the culture and the background). Mind you, I enjoyed having to make the extra effort on all of those fronts—understanding the culture, meeting new people. I had to be very attuned to my surroundings, and I enjoyed that sense that my brain was always working on overdrive to figure things out. Being out of your element has its benefits. But there can and should be a balance, and sometimes I found that being ignorant and out of touch led not to lessons learned or serendipitous discoveries but merely to frustration and fatigue. See: my entire time in Venice, where I was eternally lost and where every restaurant I found seemed to have Maestro Boyardee  running the kitchen.

KB: What country am I thinking of right now?
DM: Italy. Because everyone is always thinking of Italy.

KB: Of the destinations you visited, which one best stood up to the test of time based on Frommer’s 1963 descriptions?
DM: Probably Rome. You turn any given corner there and it’s all but given that you’ll suddenly be in front of some ancient and important and impressive landmark—the Forum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps. The same places that have been drawing delighted tourists for hundreds of years. There was a deli there, Il Delfino, that was almost exactly as Frommer had described it, and where all the patrons seemed to be older, like the could have been there since 1963. From the built environment to the general culture to the relatively high number of Frommer-recommended hotels and restaurants that were still open today, Rome was more or less what I expected based on Frommer’s (and my mother’s) descriptions.

KB: And which was the most unrecognizable?
DM: It’s a toss-up between Berlin and Madrid, since both of those cities and countries had decidedly complicated political situations back then (Iron Curtain, Franco …). Obviously, Berlin is twice the city it once was, for tourist purposes. In my guidebook, Frommer notes that you can go to East Berlin as a tourist—the wall was there to keep Easterners in, not visitors out, per se—but that it was bleak and not really worth the trip. If you did go, Frommer recommended that you “register your name with the American MPs at Checkpoint Charlie, tell them the time at which you plan to return, and if you’re not there, they’ll take action. (Let us pause to give thanks that World War III was not inadvertently started by a tardy tourist.) Today, Checkpoint Charlie is a quintessential tourist trap, where you can pay to get your picture taken with guys dressed as American and East German soldiers and then pop across the street for some Subway at the food court called Snackpoint Charlie. (Once again, I am not making any of this up.)

Also, the former East Berlin is the new tourist center of town, in part because that’s where many of the flashiest bars and restaurants are located, and in part because that’s where you can go to get your Cold War kitsch fix, an important part of the modern tourist itinerary. Take a ride in a clunky Soviet-era car; look at some Eastern Bloc architecture; buy some old Soviet military uniforms from one of the many sidewalk vendors. It’s … pretty jarring to see the Cold War themed and packaged as a tourist commodity.

KB: As a fun comparison, in each destination you visited, what would $5 buy you today?
DM:

•     Florence: Some crappy knockoff designer sunglasses from an unofficial vendor by the Arno (but only after you bargained down from the original price and the salesman, with a practiced sigh/grin, says that he’s never, EVER made an offer this low, but …).
•     Paris: A pain au chocolat and maybe a macaron from Gerard Mulot on the Left Bank, along with eternal, wistful memories of same, an enduring, bittersweet nostalgia for that transcendent instant when you first tasted the pastry rapture and for a shining, buttery blink of the eyes, all seemed right with the world. This is all true. Or a couple of condoms from the Eiffel Tower gift shop. Also true.
•     Amsterdam: Aw, bro, I know this kinda shady place down a back alley, you gotta bang on this steel door, but for five bucks they’ll hook you up with a little bag of this, like, super-primo … Gouda.
•     Brussels: A couple of chocolate bars in the shape of Manneken-Pis.
•     Berlin: Two fake East German stamps in your passport at Checkpoint Charlie.
•     Munich: Beer! Or a prostate cancer test from a vending machine at Oktoberfest. I promise this is a real thing. Unfortunately (or not), it does not involve a little robot hand cranking out of the machine, finger extended. In fact, it’s a little stick; you pee on it, like a pregnancy test, which you can also procure from the same machine.
•     Zurich: Ha! Good one. Right, like you can get something for $5 in Zurich. You take a single breath of that crisp Alpine air and it sets you back 8.35 CHF, which is, like, $210.04 at the current exchange rate, though that does include VAT.
•     Vienna:  Your choice of all manner of Mozart-themed tchotchkes. A Mozart wig, alas, will set you back quite a bit more than five dollars, but such is the price of timeless fashion.
•     Venice:  A map, so you can figure out where the *%$@!! you are in that enchanted labyrinth-land. Or a shoddy plastic version of those famous Venetian masks.
•     Rome:  Gelato. Gelatogelatogelato. Go to Gelateria del Teatro, near the Piazza Navona. Five bucks (or, you know, the equivalent in euros) will get you two scoops of creamy transcendence that rivals the Sistine Chapel for literal awesomeness.  (Hyperbole? Of course not.) Try the lemon. Or the chocolate-wine. Thank me later.
•     Madrid: A ticket in the highest, most sun-blasted seats at a novillada con picadores bullfight. Available online through a Ticketmaster subsidiary. (Again, I am not making this up.)

KB: Now what country am I thinking of?
DM: Suriname.  Just to be tricky. Because that’s one country NO ONE can locate on a map (Africa? South America? South Pacific? Jupiter?).

KB: Rate the following on a scale of 1 to 10, with ’1′ being despondent and ’10′ being unbridled euphoria:
DM:

•     Getting a book deal:  10
•     Realizing that you had to write the book: 3
•     Writing a book while maintaining a semblance of a personal life:  3
•     Finishing the manuscript: 9
•     Having to cut 18,000 words from the manuscript: 1
•     Checking edits by some 20 year old that’s never left the Northeast and couldn’t find Zurich on a map if someone dangled a million dollar bill in front of their face: 5(th Amendment)
•     Final proofing of the manuscript, being that it’s the 12947th time you’ve read the damn thing and you just wish you could get on with your life: 3
•     Rating random experiences proffered by people with ADD: 0
•     Holding your book: 7
•     Holding your book up to your nose and snorting deeply: 8
•     Using a pile of your books as a snuggle pillow: 9
•     Going to work, standing in the middle of the office, holding your book above your head and yelling “Hey cubicle monkeys! While you were naysaying my dreams and toiling at your jobs, look what I did! So, you can all just suck it!!”:  11
•     Realizing that this is the last question: -2

DM impersonating KB: Bonus question: Where can I purchase a copy or several of this fine work of literature?
DM: Why, that’s a splendid question. The book is—

KB: Uh, I didn’t ask that question—you put in this part.
DM: Sure, if you say so. It’s now available at IndieBound or Amazon or your friendly local bookseller for a mere fifteen dollars. Mozart wig sold separately.

Some days the requisite pitching that goes with being a freelance writer is akin to being the homeliest bachelor at the ball. Out of 20 women you ask to dance, 19 either say ‘no’ or don’t acknowledge your presence at all and the last one says “Yes! Just let me run to the bathroom for a sec” where she’s apparently vaporized by ninja robots because she’s never seen nor heard from again.

Last week, while occupied with the time-honored freelancer traditional of doing anything but paying work, marveling at the fantastic number of perfectly good failed/unanswered pitches of the previous few months, I launched a snarky, mock Twitter meme called “failed travel pitches.” It was super cathartic and hilarious.

Since it was so fun, I’m posting some of my favorite tweets below*. [The fact that several of my favorite tweets are my own is simply the result of me contributing about as many tweets as all the other participants combined. If I didn’t feature some of mine, it’d be a very short list.]

@mrdavidwhitley: Twenty things you’re allowed to take in your carry-on baggage that you can kill someone with. #failedtravelpitches

@mikebarish: Epaulettes and Epithets: How to Offend Leaders of Military Regimes #failedtravelpitches

@leifpettersen: Top 5 Practical Jokes that TSA Agents Love! #failedtravelpitches

@douglasmack: Five Dictators Who Will Let You Pose in Their Funny Hats With Them. #failedtravelpitches

@mrdavidwhitley: A single male traveller’s guide to ‘budget hotels near the train station’. #failedtravelpitches

@leifpettersen: Six Ways to Secure a Private Train Compartment Using Poop #failedtravelpitches

@melanierenzulli: World’s Best Places for Dutch Food #failedtravelpitches

@lpusastaff: Top 10 Bromantic Getaways #failedtravelpitches

@mrdavidwhitley: Cities with the sexiest homeless people. #failedtravelpitches

@leifpettersen: How to Say ‘Motherf*cker’ in 26 Languages #failedtravelpitches

@douglasmack: Top Six Off-the-Beaten-Path Places to Get Beaten. #failedtravelpitches

@leifpettersen: Six Countries Where You Can Stage a Coup d’Etat and Probably Win #failedtravelpitches

@sarahturner: Cerebral South Beach #failedtravelpitches

@mikebarish: I’m going to have journalistic integrity & write about this press trip objectively & critically. #failedtravelpitches

*Apologies if you contributed an especially clever tweet to the meme and it doesn’t appear here. Unfortunately, hashtag sort archives only go back seven days and, tragically, I started compiling this post one day too late, and thus pieced much of it together from memory.

What’s the secret to my modest success as a freelance writer?

•    Timing (‘bad timing’ still counts as timing)
•    Dreamy eyes
•    Writing funny shit

Funny shit is the great equalizer in the world of writing. The ability to write funny shit will often cause editors to forgive many other shortcomings such as grammar, structure, crippling overlong word counts, and frequent references to the contours of one’s bootie in first class airline reviews and the History section in the Moldova guidebook. (Every one of them warranted.)

It was funny shit that got me one of my first magazine gigs. It was, in part, funny shit that swept me into the Lonely Planet author pool. And it’s funny shit that, inevitably, makes some of my least useful blog posts my most popular blog posts. In short, funny shit has facilitated the swift advance of my very late blossoming freelance writing career, despite little experience, zero contacts and no clue.

Writing funny shit is like pretty much any activity. Practice and dedication go a long way, but having natural aptitude provides a huge advantage. Whatever the case, publicly declaring oneself as ‘funny’ is undeniably a risky move, particularly with humor sometimes being precariously subjective. And I’m acutely aware of the dangerous ego required to write an entire blog post tutoring others on how to write funny shit. However, after many years of copious and consistent positive reinforcement, I’ve decided to shoulder the character suicide dual threat of writing this post and giving away some of my favorite funny shit tricks. If I don’t completely screw this up, I expect to receive a Funny Shit Purple Heart, presented, ideally, by Emily Blunt wearing that dress from “The Adjustment Bureau.”

Now I could write an ebook about how to write funny shit, filled with content that any halfwit could find in 60 seconds of Googling, and sell it for $2.99, but all that work for $8.97 seems ridiculous. So, I’m just going to post it here. If you find it useful, you can buy me a taco someday. Here we go.

Step 1. Get a running start and kick a puppy in the face. (Are you fully paying attention now? OK, good.)

Step 2. Get stinking drunk, preferably on a socially unacceptable day for form’s sake, like Tuesday or your boss’ daughter’s 4th birthday.

Step 3. The next day, once you’ve pieced together where all the Chuck E. Cheese’s prize tickets came from, start writing. This precious window – when your brain is only firing at 25% capacity and all your filters for quality, taste, civility, and the resolve to not write about boobies are disabled – is ideal for composing first drafts that will, at minimum, offend/disappoint 70% of your readers. Write every little thing down, no matter how absurd, stupid or pointless. Don’t let the fact that it makes no sense stunt your creativity. I never have. Boobies.

Step 4. Eat an Everything Omelet drowning in Tabasco and sleep it off.

Step 5. With most of your filters reengaged, cut out most of the poor quality, tasteless, uncivil material and boobie references. But not all! The first rule of funny shit is to walk right on the line of offense. Think about it. Who was the last polite, milquetoast comedian that had any success? (Answer: Bob Newhart, circa 1984.) Even if you wanna maintain broad, vaguely edgy, Dane Cook-caliber humor, you’re gonna have to write intimate details about your butthole at least once in a while. If any of this makes you uncomfortable, I think they’re about to hire a new writer for “Garfield,” so you still have options.

Step 6. After all the cutting, what you have left is going to be less funny than what you started out with – funny shit pros call this the “second draft suckification” – but at least now you won’t get piles of hate mail from people who only read at a 3rd grade level. Obviously, you can’t post this unfunny shit. So you go through and surgically transform the unfunny shit into funny shit. Keep tweaking until the material inches back up to a state where it will offend 17% of your regular readers and 92% of readers that found your blog by Googling ‘Leif Pettersen’ looking for the recently deceased Canadian ex-football player of the same name. Some of my favorite tricks for inserting funny shit into existing text include:

•    The unexpected twist: The unexpected twist comedic tool was discovered in 7,364 BC when Grog was hit on the head by a falling coconut while walking down the aisle after his wedding vows with his beloved donkey Ook-Ook. The unexpected twist value was particularly strong in this instance as the sound of the coconut hitting Grog’s head was almost precisely the same sound as when you hit a coconut with another coconut. Needless to say, the whole tribe lost their shit. Grog, of course, slaughtered everyone to regain his honor, setting back the advancement of coconut-on-head humor for millennia, but nonetheless the unexpected twist comedic tool had been born. In written form, the unexpected twist can be as simple as changing one word in a sentence, preferably at or near the end, to something absurd and totally out of context while (just barely in some cases) maintaining the meaning of the sentence. Example: “The process of writing effective funny shit is as challenging and erratic as truffle hunting” can be changed to “The process of writing effective funny shit is as challenging and erratic as riding a fart-powered ferris wheel.” Unexpected twist, yet still makes sense. Sorta.

•    The callback gag: I use callback gags constantly, mainly because they’re reliable and fairly easy to employ. Essentially, you make a joke, or at least make a reference, and then later in the text you refer (“callback”) to that item to comedic effect. You get extra points if the callback also contains an unexpected twist. Back in the Blogging Bronze Age (2006-08), I employed callback jokes bridging several blog posts that were weeks and even months apart. That’s far less effective now with reduced reader loyalty and attention spans measured in milliseconds, so I mostly stick to callbacks contained within a single post. Can you find the three callback jokes in this piece?

•    References to popular culture: Another easy and effective tool, with the added advantage of forming a teensy bond with your reader, is referencing popular culture. It’s akin to a large scale, inside joke since people tend to identify with other people who get the same references. If you want to see this tool routinely used with wild success, just watch a few episodes of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” Though, again, pulling off this form of funny shit is a bit more delicate in written form, even with a judiciously selected Creative Commons picture thrown in for support. The key here is referencing something that most if not all of your readers will get. In this post, I make a Donald Rumsfeld reference in the first paragraph that’s only funny for people who closely follow current events in the US, which, with a global audience and reading habits being what they are, is arguably not a particularly popular choice. It would have probably been more effective if I’d made a reference to, say, masturbation or Snooki.

Step 7. After all the time and energy you put into Steps 1-6, you may feel as if you’ve gone above and beyond the effort that any sane person should put into a blog post that will probably only get four retweets because no one truly appreciates your genius, but I beg to differ. If you’re really dedicated to writing funny shit for your blog, you still have one more critical step: marinating. Put the post away for 24-48 hours then do one final, anal retentive read-through. You do this to assess whether or not your gags are still acceptably funny with semi-fresh eyes. Absorb each gag word for word. Is it funnier if you change the phrasing slightly? (Remember, funny shit is frequently going to have the biggest punch if it appears at or near the end of a sentence.) Is there something funnier that you can put in place of ‘fart-powered ferris wheel’? A bonus benefit to this step is that you get one last chance to catch any lingering typos.

Step 8. Post that mother! Remember, if your funny shit doesn’t get 84 retweets and 237 comments, it’s not necessarily because it wasn’t funny shit. It could be bad timing or too long [cough] or the topic of your post was of too narrow interest. Or your readers are idiots and you should pay them no heed because you’ll probably be celebrated as a groundbreaking humorist after you’re dead.

Or, just possibly, you’re not funny. Does this mean you should give up trying to write funny shit for your blog? Of course not. Well, OK yes, some of you should give up immediately because if everyone had the gas to drive a fart-powered ferris wheel, humor would cease to be an exceptional thing. But as I stated above, to a certain degree, writing effective funny shit can often be achieved through practice, a strong process and reliable tools.

Or, harking back to the very beginning of this post, you could simply focus on being an exceptional writer. But where’s the fun in that?

I haven’t bothered Googling to find out for sure – because who has time? – but on the strength of mounting evidence, a post on this topic apparently doesn’t exist and is long overdue.

According to figures that I just made up now, 826,936 new travel blogs are started each year and many of them give off that distinct reinventing-the-wheel odor that we old timers know all too well. What these new bloggers need is an easy to follow, chronological list on hand while they’re setting up their blogs, so as not to repeat these totally avoidable blunders. As always, my selfless, crippling empathy and generosity has inspired me to provide assistance.

So without further adieu, here’s the definitive, surefire task list for setting up a wildly popular travel blog that everyone will read forever.

1.    Remove pants. One assumes you’re setting up your blog while at home, so why not get comfortable? If you’re setting up your blog while temping at a law firm, you should probably omit this step.

2.    Pick a name. These few words may be the most important words you ever write for your blog. The name must be catchy, at least hint at the general theme of the blog and not be clichéd. Unfortunately, every combination and permutation of the words ‘traveler,’ ‘nomad,’ ‘chronicles,’ ‘virtual,’ ‘gypsy,’ ‘wanderer,’ ‘digital,’ ‘vagabond’ and words ending in ‘logue’ in the universe have already been used. So, you’re going to have to dig down to the deepest parts of your brain holes to find a name that doesn’t sound like 10 other blogs that already exist. Honestly, at this stage, if you really want a memorable blog name, your only viable option is to just grab two or three random words, never mind their meanings, and stick them together. Here are a few examples:

•    Galloping Penguin
•    Peanut Butter Shovel
•    Deafening Toe Cheese
•    Hum Gadling Jaunted
•    Paris Hilton Nude

3.    Pick a niche. This is really step 2.5, because settling on a niche and picking a name should be done at pretty much the same time. Or you can pick a niche after years of meandering from topic to topic. I don’t care. For example, I’ve selected the highly lucrative niche of writing-about-writing-and-travel-with-occasional-tangents-like-lists-and-book-reviews-and-minimalist-lifestyles-and-politics-and-ranting-about-stuff-that-I-have-almost-no-control-over-with-some-mandatory-etiquette-tips-and-videos-and-shit-thrown-in-there. (Incidentally, I’m available for public speaking on this topic at your next corporate event. Call me.)

4.    Go make a sandwich. You look peckish.

5.    Pick a design. There are a squillion free blog designs out there and two or three of them aren’t that bad. Once you monetize your blog (next week), you can go out and pay someone to create a custom design, preferably one that prominently features a cartoon version of you, wearing a backpack, walking down a winding road that disappears into the distance. No one has done this yet. You can be the first.

6.    Start blogging! It’s finally time to start writing some words about stuff. This is what it’s all about. Since 87% of travel bloggers are only semi-literate – occasionally featuring worrying grammar bonks in the same paragraph explaining how they left a high-paying corporate gig to travel the world – this is your big chance to stand out. Conjure up the most articulate, witty, evocative words that you know and then arrange them in a creative way. But don’t go crazy. If you want to have double digit visitor stats most days, you’re gonna need to crank out like four posts a week, which means that you really only have enough time to be a little articulate, kind of witty and vaguely evocative. Also, italicize frequently. Shows you’re passionate.

7.    Self-promote the bejesus out of your blog on social media. Actual travel blogging is only about 20% of travel blogging. For example, you’re going to spend a huge chunk of time building and maintaining a social media presence so you can drive traffic to your travel blog, otherwise what’s the point? Make a Facebook fan page and then spam everyone to ‘like’ it. Then get on Twitter, taking special care to mention in your bio that you are CEO, editor-in-chief and pope of your blog, as this will give you instantaneous, totally plausible credibility that no one will see through. For the first month, follow like 1,000 new people every day. If the people you follow don’t follow you back, just unfollow then follow them again as many times as necessary until they go batshit crazy from seeing the repeated email alerts about you following them and they finally follow you back just so they can get on with their lives. Once you have a strong Twitter following, send out at least one tweet a week asking your followers to ‘like’ you on Facebook. Double goes for when you’re approaching a round number of ‘likes’ and/or Twitter followers. See the genius?

8.    Set up a bunch of pop-up windows on your blog. This shows your readers that you’re serious about blogging because you’re engaging your audience with offers to subscribe to your newsletter, take a survey and buy your latest ebook about utilizing newsletters and surveys. Besides, every pop-up window is like a little surprise and who doesn’t like surprises? Masturbating socialists, that’s who.

9.    Build an editorial calendar. May 12th, 2008 was a somber day in travel blogging history. It was on that day that the very last, original travel blog post topic was hatched and written about (except this one, obviously, but now I’ve written about it so you’re too late). We’ve just been rehashing the same stuff over and over ever since, sometimes adding a desperate twist to give the appearance of originality. Say, instead of posts titled “How to pack for a round-the-world trip,” you’ll probably see a clever variant like “How to pack for a round-the-world donkey.” I’m not telling you this to discourage you, I just want to save you the time of agonizing over new topic ideas. Also, since most of you just started traveling or aren’t able to travel often, you’ll have to squeeze out like 15-30 blog posts on every destination you visit so there aren’t any periods of dead air on your blog. If you routinely go, say, 24 days without a new blog post, no one’s ever going to invite you to be a keynote speaker. As such, don’t be afraid to devote entire blog posts to the most mundane subjects like cupcakes, shopping and drunken hitchhikers that you abandon at a gas station in the Romanian countryside.

10.    Get a book deal. The big kahuna. Validation overload. They like you, they really like you. Most people spend months researching and crafting a book proposal with sample chapters, promotion, competition, and market analysis. But since you’re a travel blogger and your story of leaving your job to travel the world is so gripping, you don’t need to bother with any of that. Just send a generic email blast to every agent you can find, regardless if they only work with sci-fi fantasy writers, describing in, oh, say 5,000 words, why you and your back-story are so special. In lieu of sample chapters, simply add “Just read my blog.” Agents love doing this.

That’s it! If you follow these steps to the letter, you’ll be hosting your own travel TV show in no time, adored by fans, drinking truffle juice and so distended with success and respect that you’ll have to take two extra poops a day just to relieve the pressure.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go poop.

Happy blogging!

(This is an amendment to the piece of the same name that I originally posted here in April of 2006. Whereas that piece was filled with personal details of my first, grueling LP guidebook gig, this one focuses on the mechanics and general pros and cons of work as a LP author.)

The topic of earning a living wage as a travel writer never really gets old (at least not at my house). And now, with TBEX looming and Pam Mandel’s recent, thought-provoking post “Why I’m Not a Full Time Travel Writer”, it seems like a good time to update my experiences and thoughts on Lonely Planet guidebook work in anticipation of the inevitable conversations at TBEX.

What follows are merely my opinions. I know it may seem otherwise, but most years Lonely Planet guidebook work only occupies about three cumulative months of my time. The remainder of the year is filled with all variety of freelance work – about 90% of which, for the time being, falls within the travel writing arena. Other LP authors, particularly the ones that do guidebook work year-round, may feel differently, at least to some degree.

I should probably add that being a LP guidebook author is strictly contract work. I am not, nor is any author, actually employed by Lonely Planet. Thus the opinions expressed here are my own and entirely subjective. Let’s begin.

At this stage, if you’re interested in guidebook work and have done some homework, you probably already know that the work isn’t remotely sexy. Well, not most of the time anyway. Guidebook writing is pretty much like any work: long intervals of drudgery, bookended by moments of satisfied elation. In other words, it’s a job. Now, is it a job that you’ll enjoy? That’s for you to decide.

Guidebook research means enduring long hours (sometimes 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week while on the road – less, ideally but not necessarily, during write-up), extravagant jet lag and sleep debt, often undignified travel and sleeping conditions, and in many cases, resolve-testing solitude and loneliness both on the road and during write-up.

(NOTE: In the past few years, social media has partially cured the solitude issue. There’s a stronger sense of community with colleagues – I’m referring to all travel writers here, not just LP authors – and an invigorating level of interaction, feedback, advice and welcomed chitchat with travelers and readers.)

A challenging and draining aspect of the job is the variety of hats one has to wear. Thorough researching, competent writing, anal retentive cartography and the fortitude to walk for six to eight hours a day are only the beginning. One also should have aptitude in (or at least not completely suck at) diplomacy, psychology, lie detection, time management, financial management, stress management, multilingual translating, pantomime, physical health, emotional health, regurgitation suppression, and coming to terms with the fact that far away people possessing critical information don’t understand or care about your personal hardships or project-threatening emergencies.

All of this is usually performed while operating completely alone. There are no sick days or comp time or back-up or reliable, in-person assistance (though in-house staff at LP are largely ready and willing to do what they can in terms of remote help and damage control). As I shared in notebook-rending detail last year, things like car towage, cash machine malfunction, dehydration, bed bugs and bouts of booster rocket-caliber evacuation of bodily fluids are but a few of the potential obstacles waiting for guidebook authors. None of which relieve you from any responsibilities. If something goes pear-shaped, best case scenario you’re still able to finish your work and limp home. Worst case scenario you eat the expenses of extending your trip and risk possible reputation damage while trying to make deadline.

Guidebook authors indisputably get to see and experience many wonderful things, but is guidebook work (or any travel writing) like being paid to go on vacation? Not remotely. Nearly every research trip I take involves an encounter with a smug backpacker, sometimes holding a beer at noon, who’s under the impression that they’re doing exactly what I’m doing, except I’m getting paid. Guidebook research is to vacationing as a restaurant sous chef is to a once-a-week diner. Sure, now and again the sous chef gets to sit down to a spectacular meal, but generally they’re stuck in the hottest parts of the kitchen for 10 hours a day, sustaining frequent cuts and burns, covered in fish scales.

Each destination has varying degrees of research obligations, including but not limited to visiting and plying hard information from tour offices, a wide assortment of hotels and restaurants, museums, churches, theatres, internet cafes, nightclubs, sports facilities, bus/train/ferry stations, transport agents, embassies, foreign councils and a potpourri of lesser sights, landmarks and oddities. Depending on the destination, keep in mind that a fair number of the hotels, restaurants, clubs, internet cafes and tourism offices will have closed since the last author visit, or some have just gone prohibitively tits-up, and you are now on the hook for finding quality replacements. It’s a grueling tempo to maintain, again, for 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week, for up to six weeks at a stretch.

Depending on the assignment, deadlines and the stamina of the author in question, it’s not uncommon to allot maybe three to four days for a very large city, one to two days for a medium-sized city and a mere two to four hours per small town/village. Why the suicidal pace? Well, for most of us, it’s the knowledge that every unnecessary day spent on the road is money that comes directly out of our pockets. Authors are paid in one, previously agreed upon lump sum. There’s no submitting receipts and getting compensated later. So, one feels compelled to maintain rabid productivity, without cutting corners or getting so exhausted that you get sloppy (and your car gets towed in eight minutes flat by the nimblest, mouth-breathing asshat in Brasov).

It should additionally be noted that guidebook work, at least for LP, isn’t all just racing from hotel, to restaurant, to bus station, to museum, to tourist office, to bar, to club, to bed, repeat ad infinitum. A substantial amount of time goes to tasks that aren’t normally associated with travel writing. The biggest of these tasks for LP authors is formatting their text for publication – the modern equivalent of typesetting and no less tedious. The rules governing this text formatting, in the case of my most recent project, are bound in a manual that goes on for 144 pages. Every title, subtitle, paragraph, occasionally several words in each sentence, must be individually formatted to frequently changing, brain-damaging specifications. Obviously a long-suffering editor checks this work, but the bulk of the responsibility to get this formatting correct is on the author. Depending on the gig, text formatting (or pouring over the manual to figure out the text formatting) can exceed the time one spends writing and fact-checking.

On the gripping subject of pay: it all depends. Anyone that’s taken 10 minutes to inform themselves will know that only a handful of people in recorded history have ever gotten rich in travel writing. Even at my age, with zero experience nor a hint of grace, I have a better chance at getting rich in extreme skateboarding than in travel writing. (And wouldn’t that be fun to watch?)

However, pay is one area where guidebook work stands out in the travel writing milieu. Even before freelance travel writing opportunities and pay started to shrivel during the recession, guidebook work was, and continues to be, one of the few gigs that reliably pay a living wage. That fact compounded with the long(er) term nature of guidebook projects means that, over the course of the year, there’s less late-night fretting about scrounging up the next gig and, more ominously, when the next substantial paycheck will arrive.

Most years, my approach has been to take on one large guidebook job, the fee from which would cover my meager mortgage and keep me from starving to death for a few months, and supplement that with a dozen or so smaller, non-guidebook projects during the remainder of the year, the cumulative income from which allows me to live in reasonable comfort. Keep in mind, especially if you are single, ‘reasonable comfort’ does not include having kids, or a car, or decent health insurance, or extravagant hobbies, or even a densely populated fishbowl. As Pam mentioned, a lot of travel writers, including LP authors living in high cost-of-living areas, cannot survive without supplemental support from a more reliable second income, or inheritance, or a saintly, primary income-earning spouse, or having done exceedingly well in a previous profession.

Yet this caliber of pay is by no means a given. Not all publishers and guidebook gigs pay a living wage – or are even profitable. I’m speaking generally here, though this could theoretically apply to LP work in worst case scenarios. Innumerable factors can make a guidebook project unprofitable including workload, unplanned expenses, unforeseen obstacles, illness, inexperience, misunderstanding of the time commitment and the always lively exercise of fee negotiations.

To close on a positive note, during my first LP assignment, I was happy to report that the writing itself was fulfilling and this is still the case. Lonely Planet work has been one of the very few (paid) outlets where I’ve been able to freely write in my natural voice – or near enough to it – and boy is that fun.

Balls, boobies, fart.

So that, in wretched detail, is your intro to Lonely Planet guidebook work as it relates to the overall freelance writer hoedown. I know it’s been double the length of what’s considered to be an acceptable blog post word-count, but I also hope it’s been enlightening. If you need any clarification, just look for the single, childless, car-less, under-insured, pet-free, yet unusually contented wino skulking around TBEX.

Remember these blogs?

How Conor is Spending All His Money (now called Conor’s Mildly Thrilling Tales)

No Place As Home

The Great Wallnut

I remember them fondly. They were the first travel blogs I read, way back during travel blogging’s Bronze Age (2003-06).

I started this blog in February 2006. It was originally called “Every Notable Patch of Grass in Romania,” my account of being a new Lonely Planet author setting out on my first guidebook research gig in Romania (and Moldova). Since then, it has staggered, weaved and passed out on the couch in its underwear over the years before settling into its current incarnation: a largely aimless outlet for creativity, personal amusement, occasional shameless self-promotion and documenting the copious injustices I routinely suffer.

Before this blog, while I was feverishly traveling from 2003-05, using a rudimentary HTML template, I kept what can now only be described as a lavishly self-indulgent travelogue that covered 30 countries, the entirety of which galloped on for a cumulative 315,000 words – the equivalent of a 1,260 page book. (In my humble defense, the absurd length and detail was largely for my personal recollection and, I fancied, to someday use as a source for writing what I was sure would be several dozen award-winning newspaper articles. This was before I realized that newspapers have no interest in award-winning travel articles if they aren’t about four-day weekend getaways within a three hour drive.)

Now as my 17 or so regular readers will confirm, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, if by ‘curmudgeon’ you mean judgy, opinionated, impatient, easily irritated, sometimes unfair, and only remorseful during epic hangovers. However, I’m also nostalgic, and lately I’ve been increasingly wistful for the early days of on-the-road travel blogging.

Far be it from me to tell people how they should blog, as there’s a place for every kind of blogging and blogger (even if it’s Hell), but I ache for the era, a mere five years ago, when the actual craft of writing not only meant something but was a deciding factor for a blog’s success or failure.

There were no podcasts, ebooks, newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, SEO manipulation, videos or even an overabundance of pictures back in those days. Bloggers drew their audiences purely on the strength of their writing, because, well, there was little else to judge. But the fact remains that as travel blogging turned into a multimedia, often vacuous, commentary-driven, deluge of hastily written link bait, the desire to write (or read) more than a few hundred well-crafted words disappeared with it. This is understandable as blogs and bloggers are now largely judged on page views, subscribers, Twitter Klout and other tedious criteria that has almost nothing to do with quality of content, so why mis-allocate the effort?

Much like Andrew Mueller’s grousing over the devolving of print travel writing, it feels like the blame for the stupidification of travel blogging can be partly assigned to the readers. Agonizingly crafted, lilting, evocative text (i.e. paragraphs that exceed four lines) is all too often disregarded by over-caffeinated readers with chronic, left-click finger spasms who drift toward slap-dash lists, how-to drivel and single-celled generalizations that can be absorbed in no more than a minute or two. Much of this material is written in a hurry, without regard for creativity, voice, structure, grammar or even spelling. With a few notable exceptions, the evocative narrative is all but dead and too many bloggers are trying to jump the shark too quickly from proper travel blogging to personal branding, marketing, monetization and insta-fame.

Of the independent blogs that one can name off the top of their head, precious few are readable, and fewer still are genuine, on-the-road travel blogs. So, I’ve taken a few indulgent days to solicit, read and appraise those that are and I’d like to share a few of my favorites. This list is not remotely comprehensive and is in fact largely based on suggestions from people over Twitter and Facebook (ironically). I wholeheartedly welcome you to contribute additional suggestions for blogs – worthy of reading - in the comments.

•    Legal Nomads – Jodi has achieved the increasingly difficult trick of cultivating a strong following using only sharp, articulate essays and pictures. Hot topics include the 2010 Bangkok protests, her exhaustive travels in Burma and how her head has an invisible bull’s-eye that can only be detected by birds with overflowing colons.

•    Uncornered Market – Audrey and Daniel have been prolifically blogging their world travels since December 2006. They do an excellent job of balancing engrossing narrative, travel tips, practicalities, slideshows and the occasional, forgivable list, all done in admirably digestible posts.

•    The Big Africa Cycle – Peter Gostelow is valiantly documenting his bike journey from England to South Africa, while raising money for the Against Malaria Foundation. He shares dependably great pictures and intimate details of the adventure. The archive of his previous adventure, The Long Ride Home, his 50,000km bike journey from Japan to England, though not too pretty to gaze upon, is still available.

•    Nerd’s Eye View – Pam Mandel is not currently on the road, though she was when she started blogging back in December 2004 and still travels frequently, so I’m grandfathering her in. With consistently strong writing and all the “contrarian”, oddball fun stuff to keep a loyal following, she encapsulates exactly what old school travel blogging was about. Her recent post Eight Bad Habits of (This) Highly Unsuccessful Blogger(s) spoke to me as I’m committing virtually all the same errors, but she still somehow has 3,248,642 more readers than I do, so she must be doing something right.

•    Trail of Ants – Ant Stone has been documenting his start-stop backpacking since April 2007. Though he dabbles with a variety of multi-media, he’s been careful to maintain a high level of engaging writing. I’ll be inviting Ant to join my crack team of vigilantes, the Legion of Pissed-Off Bloggers Against Lazy Writing (cape and boots not provided), based on his post Ten of the Most Misused Words on Travel Blogs.

I heartily recommend World Nomads travel insurance

In the past few months, I’ve made two very serious attempts to learn how to type. Anyone that’s taken the time to read my alternately revealing and unsettling ‘About Me’ page will know that I type with exactly four fingers: the thumb, index and middle fingers on my right hand and the middle finger on my left. That’s it.

This system has worked out very well for me, as anyone who has read one of my 2,000-word posts can fervently confirm. So, I never really considered changing anything until I spent extended time with a few of my fellow writers and saw the true scale of my writing shortcomings. Some of these people type like Commander Data: eyes closed, hands a blur of motion, key clicks like a torrential downpour…

Freelancer Catherine Bodry types about 1,254 words per minute before coffee. Lonely Planet veteran Alex Leviton, who it should be noted has hands and fingers the size of cat paws, can simultaneously type, drink water, sing “Old McDonald Had a Farm” and still average 70 words per minute.

So I decided for the sake of speed, accuracy and impressing girls at very select parties, I’d teach myself how to type properly. It went surprisingly well – for nearly 20 minutes. I was making short work of the typing tutorials that I found online before I realized two things: when I tried to type actual words, not tutorial exercises, my WPM speed dropped from 35 to about eight (after fixing all the typos) and the muscles in my forearms and the backs of my hands went numb faster than when I carry five bags of groceries. I soldiered on for a week, giving myself short lessons, but the hand/arm pain in addition to the new, unnatural brain strain spawning facial tics and leg spasms finally convinced me to give it a rest. So there would be no chance of anyone accusing me of quitting, I created the air-tight alibi of traveling to Thailand and Burma for five weeks. No one was the wiser.

Two weeks ago I started again, using positioning tips that didn’t make my hands go numb right away. Sadly, my desk is way too tall for typing ergonomic perfection, so if I ever wanna type for longer than two minutes, I have to move my laptop to the coffee table. Again, though the tutorials were pretty easy, when it came to typing real words, my WPM became insufferably slow. I began to worry that learning to type like Catherine and Alex would take longer than the delivery of an Italian traffic violation.

Then I found salvation. Well, not true salvation, because Obama is still dragging his feet while science eagerly awaits the thumbs up to start developing a bottomless keg of Strongbow, but close enough. My pal Alexis pointed me to a video interview (below) of Diablo Cody, she of “Juno” screenwriting insta-fame. At the 1:15 mark in the interview, it’s revealed that Diablo has always, and still, types with only two fingers!

What’d I tell you? Two finger typing caught on tape! So two things seem to be readily apparent: 1) literary geniuses can’t type and 2) I am twice as good at typing as Diablo Cody, which may mean that I’m only half the genius, but that’s still better than 90% of the writers in the 21st century, so there. In any case, that’s all I needed to hear to dump this ridiculous typing neurosis for the rest of eternity.

So, now that I’ve dispatched with that predicament, I was wondering it there are there any other writers out there that never bothered to learn proper typing, but have nevertheless written an Oscar-winning screenplay? Or at least carved out a modest career in writing?

Come on. I know you’re out there.

Agonizing over travel insurance? Maybe I can help…

Hello from New York City. I’m having a fantastically productive and enjoyable time trying to make the word a better place through literary genius and drinking excessive quantities of wine.

I’m about eight working hours away from being done with the Romania and Moldova guidebook project that I’ve been picking at since May. I just have to do some copying and pasting, some proofing and I gotta find someplace to stick in my signature word that I sneak into all my LP manuscripts (‘doo-doo’). A little over two weeks ago I decided enough was enough with my lollygagging, I wanted this LP job out of my life ASAP. I realized that the only way to do that was to crack the whip and sequester myself from all humanity. So I did.

For over two weeks I only left my building a handful of times that didn’t involve securing sustenance. I went to a wedding. Went to brunch and dinner once. That’s about it. I don’t know if this happens to everybody, but when I’m alone under these conditions with virtually no genuine face-to-face contact with humans for so long, I talk to inanimate objects, abuse sugar and caffeine (then wean off sugar and caffeine when my kidneys stop working) and my brain starts to do weird things as I lose connection with reality. I skip showers (Why? I didn’t sweat today.), my toothbrush goes untouched and my mind strays wildly. The following is a sampling of passing thoughts I’ve had during numerous profoundly lonely, coffee-enhanced moments:

•    I bet if I concentrate hard enough I can move the mouse with my mind. [Hrrrrrrugh!] Almost.

•    If I just cut the crap and blogged exclusively about Gossip Girl, I could earn a comfortable living on Adsense revenue alone.

•    “‘C’ is for cookie, that’s good enough for me…”

•    What kind of jail time am I looking at for taking paintball sniper shots at football tailgaters/Hummer drivers/RNC delegates?

•    Lauren Conrad gets a three-book deal with HarperCollins and I’ve just broken the world record for consuming frozen pizza. Et tu Buddha?

•    How effing badass would it be if I grew out my nose hair and braided it? We’re talking instant record deal.

•    If I Googled ‘Google’, would the universe implode?

•    What if cherry tomatoes were actually demon testicles? That’d be cool. [Hrowmph!] Take that demons!!!

•    It smells like hamburgers in here. No, it smells like charcoal. No, my pizza’s on fire.

•    Human nature can be distilled down to exactly three instincts: surviving, fornicating and eating chocolate truffles.

•    There simply aren’t enough opportunities in life to use the word ‘fornicate’.

•    How many times does something have to happen before it becomes clichéd? A hundred? Ten thousand? Does that mean poor spelling is clichéd? If so, the Cliché Police should be here any minute. I better put on some pants.

•    Why hasn’t anyone put one frozen pizza upside-down on top of another frozen pizza, called it a ‘Pizza Sandwich”? I’d buy that. Now I’m hungry.

•    I wonder if people still use, whatdoyoucallit, ‘cars’?

Sweet Jesus, do I ever hate research. I mean I really hate it. I like to do research about as much as the idiots setting United States foreign policy right now, meaning not at all – or occasionally allowing fantastically unqualified, arrogant f*ckwits to do it for me.

It’s just so spirit sapping and boring. More importantly, time spent researching is time that I can’t spend writing hilarious, rumor-based criticism of various countries that rhyme with ‘Pitaly’ and ‘Pomania’.

But I do the research anyway. Why? Because I’m all-man, that’s why. I suck it up, eat two valium and do my duty for the sake of my art. However, this week pre-research has unexpectedly backfired on me, sparking a career-defining moral dilemma.

I’m leaving on Thursday for two weeks on the Micronesian islands of Guam and Saipan. Like the dedicated, vigilant professional that I am, I started researching a few days ago and inadvertently stumbled upon the web site Saipan Sucks, which is an apparently fact-based smear job on Saipan’s people, government and visitors. The vivid and epic pictures painted of greed, ineptitude, corruption, depravity and xenophobia haven’t done any favors for my pre-trip optimism.

I long for the days (last week) when, told of my upcoming trip, people would ask “So what’s Saipan like?” and I could honestly say “I have no f*cking clue”. Now I have to say, “Well, it appears to be a gorgeous, sandy, blue-watered backdrop to greed, ineptitude, corruption, depravity and xenophobia. Good times, eh?”

Fortunately for everyone, I am a clear-headed, open-minded, crack journalist who recognizes that just because someone wrote something on a web site, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily true (unless I wrote it). Still, it’s difficult to be totally impartial in the face of so much bad island juju, where I’ll be trapped like a plump and savory dog for six nights if any of it turns out to be true.

So, having learned this difficult lesson, I wonder if it isn’t in fact my duty to not research destinations before going? Just letting my personal experiences (and the local tourism bureau) guide my writing, without any chance of me being swayed by pesky political and social injustice? Wouldn’t I effectively be ruining my article if I researched anything? Should I never research again and just make stuff up and/or thinly paraphrase marketing copy in order to keep my objective journalistic integrity?

You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. But being damned if you don’t take less effort, so the choice seems clear.

[NOTE TO MY EDITORS: I'm totally kidding. I research stuff when the occasion truly calls for it. Like that ever happens…]