IN THE LONG RUN: A Hopeful World Odyssey - goes online FREE for the reading!

Hi,

Wow! Where does time go, eh? It's been so long since my last post.

But I have been very busy since then - blowing my own horn, as it were. If you have been to the Odyssey website - http://www.melawend.com/ - you know the tune I'm playing: My book - IN THE LONG RUN: A Hopeful World Odyssey - acclaimed by readers (http://www.melawend.com/reviews1.htm) - will soon be published online exclusively on the Odyssey website.

Starting January 7 and running through April 21, I will be publishing three chapters per week. That will be an average of 28,750 words every seven days for 16 weeks.

So, besides the day job, chores, and the times with family, that's what I've been up to - mostly doing some background writing including press releases about the online book launch, which began going out on November 27.

The responses have included postings on websites and requests for articles and online interviews including a podcast. (I will put URLs up here soon.)



Why are you giving IN THE LONG RUN away free for the reading, Tom?

The answer is simple: reader feedback.

I’m hoping that by offering it online free for the reading, a lot of people will read the book and will tell others about it and, or, tell me about good things they got out of the story for themselves.

I’m further hoping that reader feedback will help create demand for the photo-illustrated hardcover and trade paperback editions, which are already being planned with one of Canada’s top book printers.

But I am also hopeful some readers of the online edition will get enough value out of the book to want to give value back to me financially or through helping to promote the book – so I will be better enabled to write more books and give more value to others, including you.

You see, this online book launch is a make-it or break-it situation for my career as a writer. I put fourteen years and many thousands of dollars into this book. It has taken a toll on my relationships. I am also debating whether or not to keep working on a novel and some ideas for magazine articles.

Simply put, I must make a financial success of IN THE LONG RUN: A Hopeful World Odyssey or let it and the writing go. Frankly, I am at a crossroads and not sure which way to go.

So please do express your honest opinions of the book and my writing - either here, or by send me an e-mail: tom@melawend.com

All the best to you!

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008!

Tom

THOMAS MARTIN SMITH
"The Scooter Crusader"

author of IN THE LONG RUN – A Hopeful World Odyssey
A photojournalist’s two-year journey around the world on motorscooter Melawend

• “I have one problem with the book…I can’t put it down!
• “…more than a little reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings."
• “After reading it, the words ‘He’s a modern Marco Polo’ came to mind.”

Website: http://www.melawend.com/
Reviews: http://www.melawend.com/reviews1.htm

BREAKING NEWS!..... Bookmark the website NOW! The entire book will be published online - FREE FOR THE READING!
- exclusively on http://www.melawend.com/
January 7 through April 21, 2008 - three chapters per week.
Enjoy the journey!!

On Books of Real or Imagined Travel

Hi,

Do you enjoy reading books about incredible journeys? You can imagine that I do, whether they were actual or imaginary travels. Two great books that I've recently read are virtual polar opposites - Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley.

Have you ever read an author's work for the first time and feel you've made a great discovery? That's how I felt about McCarthy after reading The Road. It held me non-stop to the end. His erie tale is about the journey of a man and his young son pushing a shopping cart with their dwindling supplies though a bitter-cold, burned-out, dead-or-dying post-apocolyptic world in an effort to get to an unnamed shore. The Road one of most haunting tales I have ever read. Yet, despite horrors they faced, which included cannabalism, starvation, roving bands of murderous survivalists, and one of the bleakest environments you'll find in literature, there are signs of hope throughout the story. Small miracles occur at life-or-death moments. At the core of this tale of survival is the love between a father and son, their courage, and the flame of good in humanity that never be extinguishsed, no matter what.

It is a profoundly moving story, so beautifully written - no wonder it won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as being chosen by Oprah Winfrey. Its bleakness makes it appropriately devoid of revealing details you would expect in a travel story. In The Road, virtually everything has been wiped out, even identities. You never learn, for example, the names of the man or his son, or anyone who comes into the story. You don't know the names of any places that they travel through. You are never quite told what caused the apocolypse - it is enough to know it happened. Bleakness of person and environment is eloquently described by McCarthy but it's those little hopes and miracles he infuses into the story that kept me reading... and kept me hopeful for the father and son.

And it made me want to read more of McCarthy's work.

Then you have Travels with Charley - the much lighter and livelier tale of John Steinbeck's late-in-life, three-month 10,000-mile journey in late 1960 in a custom-made camper truck around the USA with a traveling companion - his large poodle, Charley. Steinbeck made the journey because he said he had been writing from memory for the last 25 years. He felt that he had lost touch with America, that he knew the changes in America from books and newspapers. He said, “I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light." He was determined to look again, “to try to discover this monster land.” But his son Thom Steinbeck said in an interview in 2006 that his dad made the journey because he knew he was dying. (Steinbeck died of a heart attack on December 20, 1968, at the age of 66.)

Much about Steinbeck's story revolves around simple things - camping out on the road and his initial awkwardness with that kind of travel, meeting strangers, getting supplies, minor setbacks, seeing differnces in the way people live, seeing the sights - the stuff of everyday travel around America. Travel by RV was in its infancy when Steinbeck made the journey and that reflects in his descriptions of RVing.

The book unfolds on two levels - the tales of the traveling itself - when it's just him, Charley, and the camper truck he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's skinny horse. These are often amusing and self-depricating as Steinbeck and Charley gradually become seasoned RV'ers.

The other level is Steinbeck's encounters with people - often funny, sometimes nostalgic, but also profound as they reflect the attitudes of the time. The most unsettling of these is his incognito observance of the nationally reported "Cheeerleaders" 'show' in New Orleans. It concerned the matriculation of two small Negro children in a New Orleans school. A group of stout middle-aged women - the "cheerleaders" - gathered every day to scream denunciations at them, drawing huge cheering crowds and the media as they did. Steinbeck's eleoquent denunciation of this bleak episode reminds us that racism still plagues many parts of the world.

Travels with Charley came out in 1962, the same year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had already written classics including Of Mice and Men (1938), The Grapes of Wrath (1940, winning that year's Pulitzer Prize) and East of Eden (1955) For all his literary classics - books that were largely were concerned with people and the effect of politics, history, and the environment on them - Travels with Charley was Steinbeck's most commercially successful book.

For anyone who loves cerebral, spiritual, or terrestrial travel, The Road and Travels with Charley are both superb reads!

Have you ready any great travel books lately?

Next time... My travels with Ernest Hemingway.

All the best to you!

Tom

Thomas Martin Smith

Author of IN THE LONG RUN: A Hopeful World Odyssey

- a photojournalist's two-year journey around the world on motorscooter Melawend

"...more than a little reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings."

- posted by a British expat in the MSNBC Travel Forum

http://www.melawend.com