My Next Travel Book

10.12.09 | 10:53 AM ET

I’m not yet sure where I’m going, but I know what I’m going to do when I get there: I’m going to investigate some ancient conspiracy. Travel books need to keep up with the times, if they’re ever going to regain their popularity, and just traveling to a place for the pleasure of seeing the sights and telling others about them isn’t going to cut it anymore. So I’m going to find some mysterious sect or secret society and use my travel writer skills to penetrate its inner sanctum and bring its story to the largest number of readers imaginable.

I’m also dropping my interest in people. Sure, they’ve long been seen as an essential element to any good travel book; Paul Theroux would not be where he is today without them. But the world has changed, at least the world of entertainment, and I’ve decided that if I really want to make an impact I need to forget about people and start meeting vampires. It shouldn’t be difficult; vampires are all over the place these days: in novels, on television, in movies—everywhere but in travel books. Which shows you how far off the mark travel writers—whose job it is to root out the essence of a place—have been of late.

Of course, travel books are incredibly hard sells, and vampires may not be enough. I may in addition have to meet zombies.

This book is going to talk a lot about food. When not chatting up vampires or bonding with zombies or slinking though dusty basement archives, I am going to be stuffing myself. And then writing of my meals in loving detail. This will be a travel book with recipes.

The trip I take to write this book is going to help me overcome an addiction, a malady, or some kind of abuse. For years I’ve suffered abuse from editors and publishers, but that may not be universal enough. What about this: the beautiful, heart-wrenching, inspirational story of how one man overcame his agoraphobia and became a travel writer? It’s a bit of a stretch, though I was the last kid on my block to learn to ride a bike. Great travel books illuminate the world, but they are historically weak in the self-help department. (And you wonder why they rarely land on the bestseller list.)

Speaking of which, halfway through the book at least one major character will be found dead. That, I guarantee. People love reading about corpses, and they rarely find them in sunny travelogues.

Clearly, this will be a revolutionary travel book. It will be the account of a life-changing journey, but instead of boring readers with descriptions of landscapes and encounters with locals and insights into other cultures, it will beguile them with mystery, horror, confession, the occult and cooking. It will lift up the travel book and place it firmly in the 21st century.

And I already have a title for it: “Traveling Rogue.”

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