In 2007, I was laid of from my job as an editor at PC World magazine. I was too depressed to look for another job and I had a severance package, so I did what most people would have done: I took a vacation, a long vacation, a four-month, solo trip around the world. And I had a rotten, miserable time.
I accept some responsibility: I've been told by more than one ex-girlfriend, that I'm a rotten, miserable person who deserves to die alone.
But I am from New York and we like to blame others. For the purposes of this blog, I'm going to blame various travel guidebooks that failed to mention that the countries I would be visiting were known as much for their exotic cuisine as they were for...
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| My four-month trip to all the "hot spots." |
Over the four rotten, miserable months, when I wasn't in the bathroom, I visited Internet cafes and wrote this blog. When I returned to Boston, I had 150 pages of kvetching and moaning and moaning and kvetching. Surely that was enough for a travel memoir. In 2007, Eat, Pray, Love had sold about five million copies. Surely, I could sell a tenth of that, live well, and never leave the U.S. again. I got to work.
For 18 months, I took creative writing classes, joined writers' groups, went to overpriced writers' conferences and met an agent. She said the market for memoirs was hot and suggested I rework my book.
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| Popular, semi-fictional "memoirs" of the mid 2000's |
For 18 months, I took memoir writing classes, joined writers' groups, and went to overpriced writers' conferences and met another agent. She said there was now no market for memoirs unless you were a Kennedy and that I should rework my memoir as a novel.
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| See me anywhere in this photo of Kennedys? Me, neither |
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| Prelude to the darkest night of the soul |
<to be continued next week>
Don't want to wait till next week? The end result.
