Book Time!

Thunder Bay, May 15, 2017

The beginning, May 2002:  Xi'an's Big Wild Goose Pagoda, with  Xuan Zang's statue

The middle, July 2004:  my bike in Samarkand

It's now been 8 years since the last leg of my Silk Road Ride, and fully 15 years since I set out from Xi'an, and it's been 7 years since I last posted anything for this blog. However, I've been planning for years to try to write a book about this trip, trying to distill all the adventures and experiences and people and places into something that the general reading public would enjoy.  I've started writing in the past, and I have a few chapters kicking around on my hard drive that I wrote back in 2008, before I'd even ridden the third and final leg of the trip, but I never had the time, energy and commitment to see the project through.  Back in 2002 I once wrote a book about a previous bicycle expedition, a ride with my sisters and their partners across northern Pakistan to western China and then into western Tibet.  It took a few months of hard work to write, and although I never succeeded in getting it published, I think it was a pretty good first book.  Now, though, I want to produce something much better: more polished, more readable and more immediately compelling.  I have a few months pencilled into my diary to write uninterruptedly, and I hope to have a pretty decent first draft by October.  I've cleared the deck at my current travel blog, polishing off pending blog posts from trips that I never wrote about but always wanted to.  This book project is sort of one of those blog posts writ large, a huge project that I have never really committed to fully, but which I have been meaning to for many years.  It's time to turn intentions into action.  Wish me luck!  I will keep you, my faithful readers, posted.

The end, October 2009:  Ayas, on the Mediterranean, Marco Polo's start point