I’ve been all fired up recently, about continuing my quest for publication through my Route 66 book. This is mainly thanks to my other half, who purchased a book about a woman who travels by motorcycle through the Americas. Lois Pryce, in her book Lois on the Loose, tells a great tale of people triumphing over adversity as she rides from Alaska down to the southernmost tip of South America.
There’s nothing like reading a travel book to give you that itch.
I’ve been a fan of travel books for many years, once the shelves began to be full of writers I saw as “not too old” with a witty way of writing that lured me in. Bill Bryson is a classic, although not all of his books are to my taste. Others I enjoy are Tony Hawks and Tim Moore, but I’m always on the lookout for more. I think Lois’s book appealed to me because she’s a female travel writer. As someone who regularly scours the shelves for more, I can state that there are not many humorous female travel writers out there. So it’s a pleasure to know that there is a second book by Lois, already sitting on my bedside table for my reading pleasure. Hers is the kind of writing that I can take a lot from; frank, open writing, detailing the people she met and her own reactions to situations. As a result, I’ve decided to re-insert some characteristic traits about my Route 66 travel companion, which I’d removed on the advice of a friend. I just think that a little artistic license is allowed if it makes the story a little more amusing.
I also decided to buy, perhaps against my better judgement, Billy Connolly’s Route 66 book. I know, I know, direct competition. But I did buy it through a second-hand seller on Amazon. Admittedly, I was curious. What did Billy include in his write-up of this famous road? Are our ideas too similar? How much of his feelings does he include? How funny is it?
Now, I own that I’ve only read 40 pages so far. But it’s already difficult reading for me. Yes, I’ll admit there’s a jealousy there that he was actually approached by a publisher about doing another book. It’s any author’s dream. However, there’s a boastfulness and a prima-donna-ness that come across in buckets. Why else would he write “It’s my bike. The production company might have bought it at enormous expense, and the film crew might be filming me on it, but it wasn’t our bike. And it certainly wasn’t their bike. It was my f**king bike.” (No stars in his version, obviously.)
If they bought it, doesn’t it belong to them?
Anyway, there’s more like that and I began to feel happy that my trip, my wonderful adventure, was just me and a friend, driving along on our own, doing what we wanted. We experienced a genuinely unique, life-changing experience. Billy says, in the first chapter, he wanted to “experience proper emptiness – the sense of being the only human alive for tens or even hundreds of miles”. And yet he had a film crew in tow the whole way. At least Graham and I can honestly say that there were moments when we felt as though we were the only two people in existence. It was us against the world.
So I shall struggle on through Mr. Connolly’s book. And I shall try not to be prejudiced. He does, after all, sell many more books than I do.
But with my real-life, self-changing adventure to write about, maybe one day that will change.
Dreaming of Writing... 