The Girl’s Guide to Travel Romance

“They’ll be huge!”

We are sitting in our backyard having BBQ with two fine people who have just moved into our neighborhood. The light is low and golden, I am drinking shandy — beer and lemonade — out of a pint glass. The table is littered with the detritus of our meal — a bowl of slaw with enough left for tomorrow’s lunch, an almost empty bottle of mustard, a jar of sauerkraut, some empty beer bottles. The topic at hand? My upcoming travel/romance novel series.

“I’m not doing it. There’s no way.”

“But you’ll make a fortune! They’ll get wrapped in pink covers, they can take place at all the great backpacker sites around the planet. You can franchise them and then, you’ll be on Oprah!”

“Shut. Up.”

“Don’t be so negative. You wanted to make some money doing travel writing, didn’t you? You don’t have to write them under your own name, you can use a pen name. I’m TELLING you, they’ll be great. You can TOTALLY do this.”

“NO.”

The problem is that now, I have this stupid idea lodged in my head. I keep waking up thinking of my heroine. She’s scrappy and independent. She’s taking a year off from, what… something where she’s got a little money saved, maybe she’s a paralegal or a pharmacist. I have this whole set up in my head where she’s adjusting the straps on her new pack and trying to get down to two pairs of shoes. And then she’s standing at the train station in, oh, let’s say Prague because wow, there’s a cliche if ever there was one. And so it begins, a scribbled address of a friend of a friend, or a note stuffed in last year’s guidebook, picked up at a used bookstore in her hometown, or a smeared phone number that’s now illegible because when she got off the train it was raining and she wasn’t paying attention because even though his English was halting, he was so handsome…

“They’re going to write themselves. You don’t have to even DO that much. Have you started yet?”

“Seriously. Back off. I’m not doing it. Leave me alone.”

My brain is buzzing lately and it’s not the caffeine, I can assure you. There is something cooking in there, and while I am quite sure it is not a series of vapid romance novels that take place in Siem Reap or Monteverde or Prague, I can’t tell you what, exactly, it is. It might be that I’m unemployed as of late and my subconscious has the free reign it so enjoys when I’m not living in a land dominated by acronyms. It might be that I’m sitting on some new work and just don’t know it yet. I know that I dream a lot, vividly, and am very tired from doing so. There’s a little electric hum, like something is going to happen and it could be tiny, or huge, or transitory and I won’t know until after it’s over when I can look back and say, “Oh, that’s what that was about.”

I think about words all the time. I’ve heard tell that there are people that see music, that it’s in color for them. Synesthesia, it’s called. There’s a version for words and numbers, too — synesthetes see words as having more than just letters in them, they have color or personality. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m there, but I’m bizarrely compelled, lately;  writing feels like putting together a puzzle and every word has a correct place. I’m walking around in a mental Dictionopolis* and someone has spilled the dusty, underused parts of our vernacular on to a flea market table. “Look at this,” says the voice in my head, “imagine what you could do with these words if you just cleaned them up a little bit.”

A few weeks back I watched Waikiki Wedding, a 1937 movie about a PR hack and, of course, a beautiful girl. Martha Rae plays the stenographer — she’s a typist, basically, and there’s a scene in the movie where she pecks away at a “portable” typewriter while the beautiful girl dictates. We recently acquired a 1939 typewriter; it must weigh 30 pounds; it’s certainly heavier than any luggage I’ve ever traveled with, even when schlepping suitcases full of books across the Atlantic. The ribbon is dry and the “e” sticks but the machine works all the same, and for some reason when I look at it, it appears filled with words, with a novel, maybe, or very long form nonfiction. It’s filled with words the way my computer isn’t. I stand at the keyboard pecking out sentences that make no sense out of context; the letters are embossed onto a sheet of white paper.

“Do you want to make money writing or not? Don’t be such a snob.”

“Leslie waves at the train as it pulls away. She can just see him, his palms pressed up against the glass but in an instant, he’s gone, the train is a blur, and she’s standing there alone. She notices, with a twinge of pride, that the pack is no longer heavy. It’s there, she can feel the shape of it behind her, but the weight is even, reassuring, almost. The air smells wet, the rails are shiny as she looks at the tiny window of the last car as it disappears from sight. She snaps into focus and realizes she’s still waving, even though the train is long gone. She looks at the sky; it is starting to rain, but there’s still plenty of daylight. Leslie breathes in the new air, once, twice, and then, turns her back to the station. Venice is before her, across the water, and she has no place to stay.”

“I’m not going to do it.  If you’re so keen on the idea, YOU do it. Don’t you have something more important to do? Stop pestering me.”

*Just read The Phantom Tollbooth. Now.