For nigh on a thousand years, I have been working on and talking about my just-released road-trip memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli (see May 5, 2016, "Here's An Excerpt from My Road-Trip Memoir").
I hit the road with three friends in February 1988, traveling in a converted handyman's van. From Connecticut we traveled down the eastern seaboard, and then on through Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, before entering the southwest. We ended up in New Mexico, where we lived for a few months. In 2008, I wrote about this journey on a predecessor blog; in 2011, I began expanding my story into a book. That book has now been published.
Why did it take me 10 years to finish the book? That's par for the course for me. My first book, (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity, also spent a decade in development. I'm not the most disciplined writer, that's for sure. But, as I discovered part-way through the process of writing my new memoir, I have ADD (see November 28, 2018, "ADD Me to the List"). That means I struggle to stay on task and organize my thoughts on paper, and I can get easily frustrated when I find things to be difficult.
Great/Dismal underwent a lot of changes from the initial draft all those years ago, to the one I hope you'll consider buying today. Because of my ADD (and executive function issues), I also procrastinate like a true professional. So it's not like I spent 10 straight years working on this book. I would leave it alone for weeks, sometimes even months. And even when I worked on it, sometimes progress was painfully slow. Also, I took my hands off it for a while, sending it to friends and family, seeking their input (see May 15, 2013, "Out of My Hands...for Now").
"What's the book about?" you might ask. It's equal parts Jack Kerouac's On the Road, detailing the adventures my three friends and I had while running amok in America (and also the boring parts), and Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor, with its nod to classic-era disco as well as new millennium club music.
Wait, that last part's not quite right.
It's a mash-up of Kerouac's famous book; John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley; the Rough Guide series of travelogues; the very tamest of Charles Bukowski; and a mid-life journey to self-discovery. I write not only about the four-month odyssey I took with my friends, but also about the various inspirations for the trip (National Lampoon magazine, the aforementioned Kerouac, a few free-form trips I took at the end of my college years, etc.). Additionally, I flash back to college and spend a chapter analyzing why I struggled to let my hair down during my adventure.
It's the most intimate thing I've ever written, which is another reason that I took so long to publish it. I don't like to talk about myself and my struggles, so this is a big step for me. I hope that if you buy it (and actually read it) you will connect with some part of it, whether the stupid stuff my friends and I did on our journey, or the struggles I had during the trip. And please let me know what you think, whether by posting a comment here, sending me a text or email or a Facebook message, or writing a review on Amazon, where the book is also available (along with other online retailers. You can also order one via your favorite indie bookseller).
Thanks!
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