My blog is back up!

You might be wondering what happened to this blog. Well, I've been away from Spain for a while now, passing through the UK and Canada, and Blogger decided I was a hacker and locked me out of my own blog. I couldn't recover it because my initial recovery email is from an account that has since vanished along with the providor, so I was locked out of my blog until I came back to Madrid.

I'm still trying to fix the problem so I can post from Egypt when I go there in a couple of weeks. Just wanted to give you a head's up that I haven't disappeared!

I've added an RSS feed for Midlist Writer

On the lefthand column of this blog you'll see I've added an RSS feed. While I'm not writing in Midlist Writer as frequently as I used to, due to working hard on my Civil War blog and preparing my Civil War horror novel for publication, I do occasionally post stuff here of writerly and personal interest. Don't miss a post! Subscribe to my RSS feed! And thanks for reading!

Adding pages

Hi everyone! Yes, I've been silent for a while. It's been a combination of lots of work, getting focused on my Harar book proposal, and a bit of early summer laziness.

One change you'll start seeing here is pages, which you can access via the tabs at the top of this page. These pages link to various books and articles of mine in the Web. I've put in pages for Adventure Travel and Archaeology, and will soon add Civil War, Missouri History, Harar, Medieval History, and Miscellaneous Writings.

I like the Pages option for Blogger. It's almost the equivalent of a free website!

Good advice for writers

A while back I interviewed fellow midlist author Kathryn Meyer Griffith, who gave some insights into her 25+ years of work in the business. Now she's given another interview over at Dasef Central, a fun blog I'd never stumbled upon before. There are so many it's easy to miss the good ones!

Check out this interview for some great writing advice from someone who has been at it longer than many aspiring writers have been alive. Like me, she doesn't gloss over the bad stuff. For example, "I’ve had publishers go bankrupt. . .in the middle of my book editing, had a book pulled (after the final proofing, cover done) six weeks away from going to the bookshelves, agent dumping me, long stretches – 9 years once – when I couldn’t get anything published anywhere and a hundred other fears. Awful covers, awful editors. Cruel reviews. On and on. Too many to list here. Never writer’s block, though. So now nothing scares me….much."

Ouch! Been there, survived that. I like the comment about writer's block. I don't get writer's block either. So head on over to Dasef Central and check out what it's really like to be an author, and then come on back here for more midlist grumbling. We love our job, really!

I'm interviewed on "Live Your Life Well"

Andy Hayes, managing editor of the excellent travel blog Live Your Life Well, has interviewed me about my twin loves of history and travel as part of his ongoing Travel Experiences Interviews. Hop on over there to hear me blather on about ancient monuments and achieving dangerous childhood dreams. Make sure to poke around the rest of the site too for other neat articles including one on candy around the world and a very cool piece on visiting Peshawar.

So what does the above photo have to do with all of this? Well, nothing really, but it brings back good memories of traveling in Somaliland. This guy is an Oromo, an Ethiopian people, but he works in the Somaliland capital Hargeisa as a street vendor making tasty samosas. So. . .an Ethiopian cooking Indian food in Somaliland for a Canadian??? That sort of randomness is one of the things I love about travel!

Looking back on this week's posts I notice that there's been a lot of self-puffery. So let me puff someone else for a change, fellow Madrid writer Sue Burke, who just had a short story published on Daily Science Fiction called Zero Hour. Check it out. It's only 900 words so you can take a look while the boss isn't paying attention.

Green Ethiopia

Today is Blog Action Day, a day every year where bloggers focus on a single issue. This year the issue is water so I'm sharing some of my images of the lush uplands of Ethiopia.

Wait. . .Ethiopia? That place where there's only deserts and starving children? One of the things I love about being a travel writer is exploding myths. The central Ethiopian highlands actually get a fair amount of rain and are green and fertile. This is one of the reasons that there's been a civilization there for thousands of years. These shots were taken in the Amhara province about a hundred miles northeast of the capital Addis Ababa.
There are a lot of villages in this region. Overpopulation is one of Ethiopia's main challenges. There's not enough land and when there's a bad year many people go hungry.
There's water in this stream, but Ethiopia experiences periodic droughts. There was a big one in the Eighties that was exacerbated by a vicious civil war in which both sides burned each other's crops. These two factors led to the great famine that we all remember from TV. Sadly, those images were so seared onto our memories that people don't think there's anything else to this country.
This shot was taken just west of Addis Ababa and shows a family threshing teff, an Ethiopian grain that goes into making that tasty injera bread you might have tried. Teff is a nutritious grain that fetches a high price on the market, although it requires labor-intensive cultivation. These guys are making their cattle walk around on the grain in order to separate it.

For more on my trip to Ethiopia, check out my series on Ethiopia travel at Gadling.

I have a reader in Burundi

One of the coolest things about being a writer is that you never know who's going to end up reading your stuff. As I mentioned in my post about what the blogger stats page tells you about your blog, I'm getting readers in all sorts of places. I get a lot of hits from Moldova for some reason, even more than the United Arab Emirates where I actually know somebody. (you still do read this blog, don't you Abha?)

Now I've gained a reader from Burundi. This small East African nation has only 8 million people, a third less than Greater London, but I've still managed attract a reader from there! I wonder who it is? Perhaps one of these students from Burundi's "Back to School" program?

Writing, especially for the Internet, gets you a readership that cuts across class, race, age, and geography. I was just chatting with one reader who is a World War Two veteran, and now I'm wondering about this mystery Burundian. This poses an important question for writers: when your audience is so vast and varied, how do you write to them? I'm thinking that while you do have to have certain parameters of style and subject in order to maintain regular readers, in general you just write the best you can, promote your work, and let your readers pick you.

I wonder what the next country will be to appear on my stats page for the first time. . .


Student photo courtesy the United Nations via flickr. Flag photo courtesy Pumbaa80 via Wikimedia Commons.

Best travel stories on Gadling in September

Well, this is actually a listing of my best travel stories on Gadling. The other bloggers put up a ton of great content in September, so before I review my own work of this past month, I'd like to give a big shout out to Andrew Evans and his amazing series on travel in Greenland. Check it out because it blows my own contributions out of the water. Greenland is one of the places I most want to visit, so I'm incredibly jealous that he's doing this series and not me.

Now back to yours truly. As usual, my Gadling posts reflect where I am in the world. At the start of September I was in Durham, a cathedral town in northern England. I also got to visit England's oldest Anglo-Saxon church. From England I went to Italy, where I wrote a series titled Vacation with the Dead: Exploring Rome's Sinister Side. I looked at saint's relics, tombs, catacombs, and Rome's obsession with death. My favorite of these sights was the weird and disturbing Purgatory Museum.

In addition to these features I did more than a dozen short news pieces. By far the most popular was a report on how some airport security were caught using full body scanners as porn. It had to happen sooner or later! More interesting to me was a piece I did on the discovery that a youth buried at Stonehenge came from the Mediterranean. Perhaps he's an ancestor of mine and the travel bug is genetic?

So there's my Gadling work for September in a nutshell. It's a fun job that keeps me writing daily. This was also the month that I passed 200,000 words blogging for them!

My thoughts on my page 99

As I mentioned in my post on What the Blogger Stats Page tells You about your Blog, I like to check out the data relating to Midlist Writer. In my last post I presented page 99 of my novel and asked for input. More than fifty of you read the thing but only one person left a comment. That just goes to show how many lurkers there are on the average blog! I'd really be curious to know what my readers in Colombia and Latvia think of my writing.

Anyway, thanks for the input, Sioux.

This scene shows our young band of Confederate bushwhackers riding through the woods of mid-Missouri after killing a Unionist civilian. They had never killed a civilian before but did it because they were told he was a spy who had gotten a local secessionist hanged. There's more to this, of course, and the ramifications of their actions power the rest of the novel. It's interesting that this page shows Jimmy, one of the two protagonists besides Union Captain Richard Addison, in an entirely passive role. He's usually in charge of the bushwhacker gang but he's so stunned at what they've done that he's momentarily given up trying. He will be given another chance to step back and wash his hands later in the book, and his choice will determine the ending.

So is this a good page? Well, it does have tension, and gives a bit of insight into some of the characters, but I'm not entirely happy with the Southern dialect. That's a tricky thing to get right, especially the Missouri dialect. Plus I have to put it back into the 1860s. It's something I'm still working on.

So. . .if any of you lurkers out there want to post page 99 of your novel on your blog, feel free to put the link in my comments section. I'll be sure to read it and give my two cents' worth.