Gadling

Though you could never tell by looking at my book tour schedule for Marco Polo Didn't Go There, I had a curious stop-off -- London, England -- slotted between book events in Kansas City and Chicago. I went there to record voice-over narration for "American Pilgrim," my first-ever hosting gig for the Travel Channel.

Upon arriving at Heathrow Airport after a KC-Chicago-London transit, I was met at the arrivals gate by a burly Nigerian driver in a pinstriped suit, who chauffeured me via Mercedes to the London Olympia Hilton. That was about as glamorous as the experience got; after that it was all jet lag and hard work.

In fact, not only was it all work, for the most part I didn't really feel like I was in England. Because it happened so quickly, I felt like my sound-recording experience could have just as easily happened in an underground bunker in Indiana. Apart from a couple of pub meals and a few rainy glimpses of London's Hammersmith and Shepherd's Bush neighborhoods out the window of my producer's Citroen, I didn't see much of England. Such is the reality of trans-Atlantic business travel. Indeed, after years of preaching (and practicing) slow travel, it was quite the jolt to try and experience a major world city in 48 work-filled hours.

Travel conditions aside, it was great to catch up with director Peter Wisdom and producer Jamie Broome and go into the studio to put the finishing touches on my debut TV hosting gig. Thanks to these guys, I had very a supportive and professional TV experience -- both in shooting the episode in the United States in mid-August, and editing it in London several weeks later.

Hours after completing the Kansas leg of my book tour I flew across the Atlantic for a whirlwind two-day visit to London, England. This had nothing to do with Marco Polo Didn't Go There; I was there to dub voice-over for a Travel Channel special I'm hosting this fall.

I'll talk more about this Travel Channel show in my next post, but for now I wanted to note that this TV hosting opportunity is the result of a long process of near-misses that goes back a couple of years.

In truth, I never set out to host a TV show, but I started to get attention from production studios in late 2006, when -- apparently -- the Travel Channel sent out a memo expressing a desire to have "qualified insiders" as show hosts instead of air-headed actors. This was the result, no doubt, of the fact that Anthony Bourdain -- himself a qualified insider -- had become a big star for the Travel Channel, and the network wanted to recruit more people who knew what they were talking about when it came to travel. Hence, thanks to my decade of experience as a full-time travel writer (and my pouty, cheek-boney author photo -- an anomaly I'll discuss in a future post) I got a lot of attention from TV production companies last year.

In my last post I mentioned how I spoke with Thomas Fox Averill's writing students at Washburn University -- and specifically about how you can use travel experiences to improve your "sense of place" descriptions, in fiction as well as nonfiction. Of course, mere travel isn't the only way to improve your sense-of-place writing chops -- it's also useful to use research information and creative juxtaposition to enliven your descriptions of place. From the pages of Marco Polo Didn't Go There, here are three strategies and examples for creating a stronger feeling of place in a story:

From Chapter 9: Evoking sense of place using direct description and contrasts

After a somewhat lonely showing in the Salina Central Mall, I took my book tour east on I-70 for a series of events on college campuses in Manhattan, Topeka, Lawrence, and suburban Kansas City. It was here, amid college students who were keen on the message of Vagabonding and intrigued by the tales in Marco Polo Didn't Go There, that I feel like my book tour finally hit its stride.

I suspect that university campuses will always be my bread and butter when I tour for books -- if nothing else because of the "time-is-wealth" slant of Vagabonding, which college students are always keen to hear. My tour of northeastern Kansas colleges started at Kansas State University in Manhattan, where I was slated to give keynote address to the Kansas International Educator's conference. The word "keynote" was slightly intimidating (it made me feel like an adult all of a sudden), but I decided to keep the subject matter of my speech close to what I know best -- travel, and the gut-level lessons you learn when you live in unfamiliar cultures. Since these concepts are easily applicable to international education, this led to a great post-talk discussion of living overseas, including safety issues and how to best motivate students to leave the comfort of home and study/travel abroad.

Around the time Marco Polo Didn't Go There was set to debut in bookstores, I began to wonder what kind of negative comments it might attract. I wondered this not because Marco Polo is a bad book (to the contrary, I'm as proud of it as anything I've written), but because some degree of knee-jerk negativity is inevitable in the instant-reaction atmosphere of the Internet Age.

I learned this when I debuted Vagabonding five years ago. For the most part, of course, reader reaction to my first book has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. But every once in a while I'll get an email or a blog comment that basically claims I'm a contemptible jackass because of some theme or observation in the book. One rather perplexing criticism that recurs from time to time is that Vagabonding is "preachy."

At first this observation baffled me, since I urge flexible open-mindedness from the opening Preface chapter ("Add what is specifically your own...The creating individual is more than any style or system"), and the only things I preach against are postponing your travels, micromanaging your itinerary, or traveling too fast to truly experience your cultural surroundings.

After a bit of follow-up, I've discovered that most of these critics were upset by my "anti-marijuana" stance. The thing is, I never come out and tell people to not smoke it on the road; all I say is to (a) not get caught traveling with it in places where it could land you in jail, and (b) don't get into the habit of using it all the time, because it will separate you from the more mind-blowing experience of unfiltered reality. That's as anti-drug as I get in Vagabonding -- and in fact (while I've never much been into smoking it myself) I'm all for marijuana legalization in the United States.

Waldenbooks, Salina Central Mall

Having completed my first and only shopping-mall-based Marco Polo Didn't Go There book-signing, I now know what it feels like to be a public social oddity -- to have people furrow their brows at you in bafflement at the sight of you, or avoid eye-contact altogether as they walk by. At times, as I sat in front of the Waldenbooks outlet in the Salina Central Mall with a stack of my books, I felt less like an author than one of those guys who gets hired to dress up in a chipmunk costume and hand out promotional flyers for a car wash.

In retrospect, I realize it was unrealistic to think that an all-purpose indoor shopping mall in a mid-sized, mid-American city would be a good place to tout my book. After all, your average person heads out to the mall on a Saturday to shop for shoes or catch a movie, not to impulse-buy a travel-themed book by some guy they've never met before. However, since the mall Waldenbooks is the only place in Salina where one can buy new books -- and since I'm now based out of a small farmhouse about 8 miles southeast of Salina -- I figured it would be good form to make an appearance there.

After having participated in more structured book events on college campuses or in indie bookstores (for both my new book and for Vagabonding), I don't think I was quite prepared for an appearance that basically involved sitting at a table with a stack of my books and greeting passersby. In theory this might seem innocuous enough -- that is, until you realize that the only other people doing this in the mall are pushing gym memberships or cell phone plans. Thus, your average Saturday shopper has gotten used to avoiding eye contact with anyone who sits at a table and greets them in a friendly voice.

For someone who is not used to being in such situations, this can be a humbling experience.

My virtual book tour for Marco Polo Didn't Go There ended just last week, and -- while it was a lot of work -- it ended up being quite the success. Over course of ten days, I visited online venues like Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Work Week and National Geographic Traveler's Intelligent Travel to answer questions and share stories and photos. CNN.com ended up linking my interview with Budget Travel's "This Just In" from its front page, and both the New York Times' Ideas Blog and Arts & Letters Daily linked my Q&A at World Hum (which, while not an official part of my virtual tour, did coincide with the event).

During the course of this online tour, I answered all manner of questions about travel and travel writing, including advice for aspiring writers, my most shocking moments as a traveler, and the cross-cultural ramifications of wiping your ass. This was all great, and I loved tackling those kinds of queries.

What I wish sometimes, however, is that someone would ask me the kind of questions they ask rock stars in Blender Magazine.

Ever read Blender? It's great stuff -- a hilarious blend of music advice, brief celebrity interviews, and obsessively categorized music nostalgia and trivia. I mean, sure, I subscribe to The New Yorker, The Economist, Poets & Writers, and a whole pile of travel magazines -- but when I return home from a journey to dig into my stack of magazines, I often find myself going for Blender first. It's just good fun.

Since nobody ever asked my any Blender-style rock star questions during my virtual tour, I think I'll ask those questions of myself right now. Here goes!

After just two days on the road promoting Marco Polo Didn't Go There: Stories and Revelations From One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer, I have learned one important lesson: Sex sells.

Or, at least, sex gets people's attention in an otherwise staid bookstore environment. This is something I discovered by accident, when I arrived in Wichita for an event at Watermark Books and realized I'd left my laptop (and standard PowerPoint presentation) back on my farm, 90 miles away.

My forgetfulness, I think, was the result of my micromanaged book tour. Having written a book called Vagabonding, which is all about the pleasures of slow and deliberate travel, embarking on a strictly scheduled book tour is kind of a contradiction. This was the case when I toured to promote Vagabonding in 2003, and it is doubly the case on this book tour, which will visit twice as many cities as I did 5 years ago.