My talented sister-in-law finished the cover design for my book, The Drive North: A Swing Down Memory Lane. It is now with the publisher and the printing process will start once I see the final proof. One of the few things I wasn't able to do on my own, like the cover, was the synposis. I tried to squeeze what I wrote and rewrote in hundreds of pages down to a few paragraphs, but I couldn't do it. So, the publisher did and I wanted to share it with everyone here.

Some of the cover writin...

I had to do a lot of preparatory research before writing my book, The Drive North: A Swing Down Memory Lane. A lot of it was rather tedious and boring historical reading, something I thought I was over when I graduated from college, but there was an occasional gem that I really enjoyed. One of the books that helped me along the way was Lizards on the Mantel, Burros at the Door: A Big Bend Memoir by Etta Koch with June Cooper Price.

Etta Koch moved her family to the newly created Big Bend...

All of my present-day travels across the globe are grounded in those which I experienced with my family as a child. We drove everywhere - with the exception of one trip, if memory serves correctly - and it was always in the big, gray conversion van we nicknamed The Beast. I'm almost positive it ticked over 500,000 miles before my father sold it, and later found it abandoned, dead, alongside the road one afternoon. Well, to be upfront, I've been a bit homesick for those trips of late. I've t...

I've spent the better part of fifteen or sixteen months researching and writing a travel memoir, and now it's all on two little USB sticks on my desk. I still have a lot of editing to do, and things to change, but the better part of my first book is done and I couldn't be more happy. I'm pleased with the way the trip that I'm writing about went, as well as how I'm incorporating past travels into the story, and how it has come into being electronically. But now the hard part of fine tuning ...

A number of friends have told me that I need to write a book about my travels. They remind me of all the places I've seen, and encourage me to write a book about it all. So, after hearing enough of it, I've finally got the ball rolling and am about halfway through the story - something I've found to be much more difficult than I had initially anticipated.

I knew writing a book would be a lot of work, but you just pour so much of yourself into it that it's difficult not to fuss over every...