Travails of a Guidebook Author

I’d call it PTSD, but I’m not out of the woods yet. Two books yet to finish before the end of July.
Meantime, I’m having the following nightmares:
*I get a call from my editor at Rough Guides, asking if I can make another trip to Mexico soon. I say yes, because I know I have a [...]

Huh. I wrote this in a frenzy last week, and never posted it. Sad how the glory of pit-roasting wears off after just a few days back at the city grind. But right now I’m working at the building down at the WTC site, which is so beautiful, and the people in the office are [...]

Nicely, The Age of Melbourne printed my indignant letter re: the earlier LP-was-our-idol-now-let’s-destroy-it story.
Whenever Peter and I talk about the complaint letters we’re planning to write, we just mime typing and say, “Mrah-mrah-mrah mrah-mraaaaah” in a cranky voice. It’s a rare moment I was actually able to say something more articulate, and it’s also good [...]

I’m so busy criticizing, I didn’t get around to posting something fairly well done: Michael Shapiro’s story for the Washington Post last week, Can You Trust Your Travel Guidebook?
I spoke to the reporter (or, really, emailed with), and he didn’t seem to have an agenda going into it, unlike Peter Munro. I think the story’s [...]

First, it was reporters who couldn’t even spell Colombia right, or bother to check the name of LP exec Judy Slatyer. Now it’s another scandal-loving story about Thomas Kohnstamm and Lonely Planet in Melbourne’s Sunday Age: A Guide Delusion Makes It Lonely at the Top.
I had a sinking feeling after my phone interview with Peter [...]

Not a lot of them, but there is a picture of that weird dead animal I saw in Madrid:
New Mexico April 08 photo set at Flickr.

The fruits of last year’s labor, in the form of Lonely Planet’s Egypt guide, is due on store shelves in a couple of weeks. And while you’re waiting for my masterpiece to arrive, the savvy folks at Lonely Planet have made the full text of the book available in PDF, through its clever “Pick & [...]

Just a little more light shed on the whole Kohnstamm business: a good essay on World Hum by the always smart Robert Reid, who I also happen to know in passing through LP and other friends.
He has the empathy for Kohnstamm that most don’t (or aren’t willing to have), and he summarizes the small [...]

I like writing travel guides. I like it a lot, even when I complain.
But I think I like making the maps more. Maybe I wouldn’t like cartography as a full-time job, but as a break from all the damn writing and phone-number-checking, pulling out my ruler, white-out and colored pens and getting down to business [...]

As it happens, ABQ wasn’t so big-city after all. I was strolling around downtown (aka The District, according to the slick magazine/brochure the city puts out to promote its new urbanist efforts), and happened to spy an ancient-looking shoe store: a faded sign jutted out from the shopfront: “HALE” vertically, block letters, “shoes” horizontally in [...]

So that night I was writing the last post, and it got really late…I very nearly screwed myself. I went out to the restaurant that’s in my guidebook that’s known for staying open late. But they were just closing. They sent me to a newer bar on the south side of town. I [...]

Since yesterday, I have been embroiled in and fascinated with Kohnstamm Kontroversy… Fortunately it landed on a couple of days when my research schedule has been relatively light. My main challenge in Taos has been catching up on all the new restaurants (ha–I typed ‘restrooms’ first by mistake…perhaps also true). I carefully charted out which [...]

I would love it if some random visitor to this site (since there are so many at the moment) knew how to fix my damn comments. Anyone? I’ve emailed my site host (Yahoo–boo) and of course they’re no help, and I’ve trawled every help forum I can find. Internet, send me an angel.