Travel Is Dangerous and I’ll Say Hello, Eventually

For the past five years or so I’ve been working on a book.

I started writing this book in a shitty aparment in Terra Linda, California. I had become very disinterested in the idea of california, the culture of california, my shitty job, the lack of friends, So I just spent a lot of nights writing. Writing my thoughts in an attempt to do something  creative. Like most things, I got about 50 pages in and realized it was scatterbrained, and very coffee driven, so I filed it away.  I began to accept my surrondings and went out a bit more. Pushing aside the desire to write one concrete thing.

Flash foward to a different time, I moved back to my home state of Michigan. I started writing a bit more, kind of tapped back into the place I was when I began writing.  so I compiled these new writings  into the same folder of ideas  and stories as the earlier ones. These all kind were about  feeling lost, and idea of feeling like travel is more of home, I’ve always identified with the band culture where people say that when they are on the road so much it in a sense feels more natural than their home. The direction and focus of the book, didn’t change it just really formulated itself into something more.

My writing continued through my time in Michigan, back to California, back to Michigan, to New Hampshire, then finally back to California.  During this time I’ve met a lot of people, missed a lot of people, and have come to realize a lot about myself(good, bad, and alright stuff) My writing became very universal and I started wanting to look more of the ideas of a generation, I wanted to tell a story about being lost, and not my story, but potentially a generation of people who are in this time. A story that deals a lot about travel, a lot about the search for home, and a lot about understanding what it means to have no idea about anything at all.

So it was with this realization that I scrapped the intial part of the book, and instead focused on more of essays from fictional characters about that same feeling being lost in this age and trying to find some semblance of normalcy, the book is told through multiple points of views, from multiple places, with a thousand different ideas being shared. It’s all fiction, for the sake of if you had to call it a fiction or non-fiction book.

The book is called- Travel Is Dangerous,  it’s named after the Mogwai song, which to me pretty much is an amazing song that really captures the essence of the various essays of the book, and is just an amazing song. If you have not heard it I highly recommend  it(can I ever write without mentioning music,doubtful!)

This book was written in motel rooms, basement floors, bedrooms, parks, kitchens, coffee shops, airports, in notepads, lap tops, typewriters, work computers, in various random states across the U.S., a majority of the book was written in California, Michigan, New Hampshire, Vermont, and I finally have the last few essays I want to write in my head, I am going to do that on my next vacation(to Michigan) and then I will release it.

I don’t know how, I may just end up putting it up chapter by chapter on this blog, and hope that people read it. I would prefer people to read it in book form, but I’m not going to self-publish,  I’ve thought about submitting it to magazines and hopefully someone reading this can give me a suggestion, the most important thing is I want people to read it. That is the most important aspect of everything. I mean I’ve spent since 2005 writing this book. I think it should be read, I’m not ready to just let it sit and collect dust so to speak.

So back to the beginning of this, I started writing a book that became something else, that is still also being worked on, that book is a lot more personal(though still I would say fiction) it deals more with me and my thoughts, and things that have happened to me in my life. That will be called I’ll Say Hello, Eventually it is very different than Travel and is structured more like a novel than essays.

I just wanted to get this out there, so that I would force myself to get these things done, edited, and eventually in some format published.  I’ll write more about  Hello, later. I just wanted to start kicking around blurb, and explanations of Travel Is Dangerous, as that will be the first book to see light of day(in some form)

I hope that if this happens people will read it. I’m not saying I have anything profound or life changing to say, I’ve just lived through a lot and know people who have lived through even more. I just hope in someway, these stories will help.

best,

Justin

To Listen-  Mogwai- Travel Is Dangerous

“who might know of this
the notes we left
our final thoughts
and we knew they’d get us out”

~ by justinjdrabek on May 28, 2010.