Writing

You may recall the song about Bloody Mary in South Pacific.  "Bloody Mary's chewing betel nuts.  She is always chewing betel nuts.  Bloody Mary's chewing betel nuts, and she don't use Pepsodent."  Of course, it also noted that her skin was "tender as DiMaggio's glove".

One of the things that makes extended writing possible is to have a structure. Not all authors do an outline before writing. But for your book, I would suggest having a structure in mind.

I would group events by chapter. Have each chapter focused on one aspect. For example:

Chapter 1: Airport Hell

Chapter 2: Funny Asian food

Chapter 3: Getting to Know the Natives

Chapter 4: Sites, Museums, and Architecture

Chapter 5: Travel Tips for Visiting Asia

Chapter 6: Urinating in Elevators and other Anecdotes

That allows you the freedom to collect thoughts and small stories instead of being faced with a potentially onerous task of a start-to-finish travelogue, all in perfect order according to the calendar dates.

Here's Amazon's landing page for preparing an eBook.

Here's the eBook Manuscript Formatting Guide. The page is thick with instructions, but I'm guessing it's not too complicated.

It looks as though the instructions take Word as the default word processor. From there they have some automated softer, such as Kindle Create (Mac or PC), to help with the process. And to check your work, you can use Kindle Previewer (also Mac or PC).

Thank you, Mr. Kung. But no one wants to read a book titled “You’re All a Bunch of Idiots and Deserve What You’re Going to Get.”

LOL. You may be right.

Think about how fortunate we are that so many talented people write books, fiction and non-fiction. We all certainly gain a lot of enjoyment and knowledge from them.

Here at Reviews&Things we can create quite timely writing, both for media that others might be interested in, and regarding the Ridiculous Thing of the Day. This writing is less permanent. But I enjoy it. And just as I’ve criticized the vanity publishing at the now defunct StubbornThings, so I will condemn it in myself: I don’t have any novel-length thoughts.

But a book of essays? Perhaps. But I’m a defeatist, at heart. I know ahead of time that very few people want to know what I think. And I’ve mostly made peace with that, neither setting myself up in an ivory tower nor assuming that everyone else is a Vulgarian.

But there are an awful lot of Vulgarians out there.

A lot of folks here might not understand Mr. Kung’s reluctance to write a travelogue about his adventures in Asia. But I have sources deep in the industry and they uncovered this video of Mr. Kung aboard an airliner. I happen to think these stories make for good reading, even if a little personally embarrassing. But I can understand why he would want to leave these personal incidents out of any such endeavor.



After boarding a plane and sitting in someone else’s seat, Mr. Kung (unless I’m mistaken about the identity) was quoted as saying:



We can be fairly sure that was Mr. Kung. Who else would have stuck up for the principle of freedom like that?

In a related video, civility obtains again aboard an airliner. The real actions starts at about the 1 minute mark.

I’m telling you, I really do not every look forward to traveling in an airplane again. I think crowds are getting increasingly dangerous. However, if you think of this as a free floor show, there is that aspect.

 I believe it is common for many people to gaze into such mirrors without being conscious of it.