the Stateside Wanderer

For this essay I was asked to do one thing:

“Describe 3 processes which you were a part of from start to finish. Spare No detail.”

Alright, get ready for a read.

The first project I’m going to talk to you about is the completion of my first book. It’s not one you’ve likely read, but I would call it one of the largest accomplishments of my life. More so because of the battles with self-doubt and outside criticism than anything to do with literary or grammatical concerns. I’ve always been a notetaker and this came in handy during January of 2017 when I found myself on a road trip through Central America working as a translator for three guys who I knew from back home in Virginia. The one had text me out of the blue a few months prior asking, “How much for two weeks of your time?” This sparked a conversation as to me wanting to know why and ultimately led to him telling me that he needed to get away for a while and wanted someone he trusted to go with him on this trip and stay by his side as a translator and ambassador of sorts. I suppose to understand why I am even qualified for this it would be important to tell you I’m not of any Spanish speaking descent. I didn’t even start learning the language officially until I was around 20 years old in college and found myself roommates with a guy whose family was from Puerto Rico. When I was in high school I used to listen to Reggaeton music in the background as a way of keeping on some tunes without allowing myself the option to sing along. Keep in mind this was a bit before music downloading was a big thing and I hadn’t had the opportunity to discover techno or ambient sounds as a more logical alternative. So perhaps it was those subconsciously embedded lyrics which made the next part work for me. One day while in our dorm I told Joe, “Habla Me” as a way of trying to engage him in Spanish. I then proceeded to tell him that I wanted him to start talking to me in Spanish as much as he could whether or not I seemed to understand him. He started doing this at first in situations which had some obvious natures to them; talking about girls we saw on the street, food we were eating, and any other small level interaction where I more or less knew what he would have said about the subject in English had he chosen to do so. This went on over the next year or so and to be honest, I didn’t really pick up much as far as an ability to respond goes. It wasn’t until later that year when I started working at a restaurant that I decided to take my efforts to the next level. I did this by learning how to say the types of things I would need to say when approaching a table. The usual stuff, “Hey how are you? What would you like to drink? Have you been here before?” Once I had these phrases memorized my natural tendency to speak pretty quickly came out and I would approach a table with some rapid Spanish only to be met by a group of people who then rightly assumed that I must be fluent. This led to an array of interactions that we will only talk about in person one day due to the amount of time it would take to get through them all. At first I found my ways to let guests know that I wasn’t really that fluent, but I quickly got tired of this and just started faking it by nodding my head and more or less leading them to believe I understood everything going on. This act only worked until the moment a burger would arrive at the table with onions when the guest wanted none, or a burger so overcooked they wondered if I actually hated them. Luckily, these mistakes added up quickly and soon I had a full vocabulary with regards to anything that could happen in a table or kitchen setting. Although I wanna take all the credit for this there is an endless list of cooks, managers, servers, and guests who contributed to my Spanish education during my time at that restaurant. This education soon intertwined with other parts of my life and I eventually got my masters in Spanish via a five year relationship with a well educated South American. Lex, you will never learn a language quicker than when an angry woman is yelling at you. It’s gotten to the point that I instinctually speak to all dogs in Spanish. Yes, people tend to find it pretty weird. During this entire process I traveled abroad several times, mostly through Latin America, and more often than not was doing so alone and was constantly in situations where I had to sink or swim, and damnit I’m still breathing. As far as the language learning side to this goes, my last great leap took place when a group of Bolivian friends I had acquired in my mid-twenties had a wedding of two of its members and I was asked to get ordained in-order to perform the ceremony in Spanish for their family members who were traveling to the United States to attend. I was conflicted for a series of reasons, but ultimately there was no part of me that could turn that down. So then I had to go and learn some religious texts and ceremonial phrases in Spanish, most of which I had never heard before. It was then at that wedding in May when I almost stepped outside of my body as I was up there performing the ceremony and I had the thought, “Welp, looks like you’ve maxed out this language here…what’s next?” With that question I soon got myself down another rabbit hole and started teaching myself Arabic. I know this may sound crazy, but my grandfather on my mothers side was a Swiss who spoke seven languages and I would credit him for me thinking any of this was possible. I won’t bore you with the Arabic details, mainly because I’m not yet fluent and I can’t claim much for an ability to go traveling alone at the moment. Sooner rather than later I hope. All the while this was going on my friends from back home, a small town in the mountains of Virginia, checked in on me periodically asking about my weird life. I suppose it was one of them that told Luke about me speaking Spanish, and I guess that’s what led him to hitting me up about the trip. Now once I agreed to go on the trip I had a whole set of tasks in front of me. I had to check and see if we needed any special shots for where we were going, get plane tickets in-order, map out where we were going to go inside the country, and a whole bunch of other things that come with traveling. None of this was new to me exactly, but the idea of doing it with so many other people attached truly was. I hate to admit it Lex, but once we got the ball rolling I made my first mistake. I booked us tickets to San Jose, California instead of San Jose, Costa Rica. Oh, and I did it with someone else’s credit card, so I had to immediately own up to my mistake. No fun. I won’t bore you with the details of packing. Although something tells me you wouldn’t be very bored. Just know that we took everything, even night vision goggles. We were ready for whatever we could do down there. From the get go, the trip was nothing like we had planned. Our flight was canceled due to volcanic ash somewhere 100 miles from San Jose. This caused me to improvise last minute and re-route our tickets to Panama City, Panama where we rented a car and took off on a road trip to our original destination. I know that sounds like a drastic change, but I also learned that day just how hard it is to get yourself on the ‘next’ plane when you’re traveling with three other people. The whole time I kept thinking, “Damn, traveling alone is so much easier.” Since we had planned the whole trip out I then had to go and find all new hostels and places to visit before we landed. When we finally got there things started going pretty smoothly. We found a great beach to go fishing, accidentally met the new President Juan Carlos Varela, hiked through the jungle, and eventually made it into Costa Rica. Logistically the majority of the trip was no big deal. It was just a matter of finding the next spot and then making arrangements for once we arrived. We were lucky to meet a really cool girl running a hostel in San Jose who gave us some ideas about other places to visit in the country and I used her as a point of contact over the next few days. Given the nature of this trip it was inevitable that my notebook would come out more than a time or two and I soon found myself with pages of notes about each day (again, something I’ll gladly share with you if we ever meet). When I got back from the trip I found myself talking about it constantly. Whether I was out to dinner with friends or I was catching up with my family, it was the only thing that came out of my mouth. I soon saw that the stories I had from the trip were holding audiences for as long as I could keep them going. This was both great and annoying. You see, the thing I didn’t mention is that when he hit me up I had just started doing stand-up comedy as a hobby a few months before and although my performances were going well enough, NOTHING got the type of attention that my stories from that Central American road trip did. I still remember the moment when I was sitting there with my notebooks looking at the jokes I had and looking at the notes from the story and the thought came to my mind, “Damn. I bet I can write a book faster than I can write an hour of comedy.” Turns out I was right. I then spent three straight days (without any substance beyond caffeine) writing my first draft. I wrote from the time I got up to the time I fell asleep at my desk and at the end I had a draft of about 27,000 words. It wasn’t perfect, but it was in chronological order and I knew I had something. Having never taken on a project of this size or written any type of thesis I started looking into anything I could find with regards to advice from authors. I was quickly overwhelmed with a variety of conflicting advice and decided that the only way to get a book done was to sit with it for as long as it took. So that’s what I did. I devoted every moment I had to doing what I called ‘filling in the gaps’. As I saw it the story was done, there wasn’t any character development to worry about or ending to wrap up. It had all happened, I just had to put it on the page. To do this I would sit for hours working on just one section, then move to a far away section, making any jumps I needed to in-order to keep my mind engaged. Now, as I said, these stories had done pretty well when told in person, but I knew I eventually needed to test them out on a literary audience. From there I started sampling people I worked with on the types of books they liked to read and waited until I had found a few beta readers. Knowing that feedback is not always true I decided to sit and watch them as they read my work, noting their reactions and keeping track of what pages seemed to get the most reaction. Via this process I then tightened up the areas where people seemed to be bored or take forever to get through, and expanded upon the areas that already seemed popular. During this time I also started to learn more about the types of people who seemed to like my writing, making sure to focus my dialogue around the types of topics they happened to bring up. In that sense the dialogue is the only part of the book I would call falsely cultivated as it didn’t hold true to the dialogue that took place on the trip. I knew I needed to do this because in the end I also had a duty to not shit all over my friends who went on the trip with me. There was no point in using what I thought was interesting dialogue if it somehow put someones relationship or job in jeopardy. I hate to say it, but I still to this day wonder if I messed up on that part. I find the truth to be the best path, but I’m not an executioner and these people never agreed to be a part of my literary experiment before the trip took place. With the feedback I had I continued to write and did whatever it took to make my life revolve around finishing that book. Once the book was done I had to then seek out an editor. For this I turned to a man I had met while working at a restaurant who was a former translator and categorizer at the Library of Congress. He had recently retired and was excited at the thought of something to do with his time. We spent about six months together going over the book. Neither of us had really done this before and it turned out to be a learning experience for both of us on many levels. Realizing that there was more to a book than just writing it I soon had to start looking into everything from cover art to marketing schemes. I must have spent hundreds of hours listening to YouTube videos about Kindle Direct Publishing and all of the other options self-published authors had. It’s not that I didn’t want an agent, that would be lovely. I even got in touch with a few via some website which gave me links to a lot of personal emails, but I wasn’t going to let a rejection letter keep me from holding a real copy of my book. The first company I went with was called Book Baby. I chose them mainly because of their speedy turn around. This was about the time that I realized I needed to file a copyright. Not having much money for a lawyer I then went down that tunnel and soon found myself with that experience under my belt. I even later learned about altering a copyright. The first copies arrived the same day I was set to leave for a trip to visit my sister in California. I was never more annoyed with a vacation. The only thing I wanted to do the whole time was check the book for this and that, hoping not to find any mistakes. I didn’t like the initial feel of the book. The size was right, but the book was glossy and slick. This became one of several things that I set out to change for my more public release. Book Baby was great, but the best of the best was still said to be KDP through Amazon. Which should seem obvious because they also give you the ability to distribute and sell the book once it’s done. Knowing that I had a color heavy cover I started ordering any type of book that resembled mine and then would feel the covers for anything I liked. Then I contacted Amazon and started asking for specifics about each book that way I could get mine to feel and look more professional. Turns out matte is the way to go. Once the physical details were worked out I set up an Author Page on Amazon and uploaded my final files for publication, waiting for my riches to pour in. Lex, I’m applying for this job so we both know this didn’t happen. What did happen was I learned more. I put a QR code in my book linking people directly to the Amazon page where they could leave a review. I made stickers with that same code on them and put them all over any city I visited over the next few months, keeping track of my click through rate and general popularity in each location. With that info I started pitching my book to book clubs, got it on GoodReads, and gave out more free copies than anyone would consider sane. I tested categories on Amazon, ran campaigns on KindleFire, and went through about 100 author photos, titles, and other small adjustments to help me anywhere I could. Along the way I kept on telling strangers about the book I was writing. At the time I was still bartending so I was met with mixed reactions from a lot of people who saw me as the sad cliche of a man who would never finish the book he claimed to be working on. It was really odd to feel such strong doubt from people when I knew how hard I was working on the book each night. I’ll never forget the last time I even told anyone that I was writing a book. I waited on a table of four, a nice family from what looked like a wealthy background. When I spoke of my travels or my life the matriarch of the family seemed to adore me, but then when she asked me what else I was up to and I responded with, “Oh, I’m writing a book” her face gave me this expression of a person who all of a sudden saw me as a hopeless struggling artist and she said, “Oh, how nice.” and never asked another question about it. Little did she know I was literally days from receiving my copies and I remember in that moment thinking, “You know what, I’m not saying that sentence ever again, I’m not even talking about this until I can say…Oh me? I’m working on my SECOND book.” Which by the way, I now am. Either way. I’ve now told you how I went about learning Spanish via my own curiosities, how I arranged a group trip through Central America, and how I turned all of those things into a book. To think, all of this just came from me saying, “Habla Me.”    

For The Record….this essay did come from a submission I made to Lex Fridman when applying to work for his podcast. I reached out to him to ask permission to use what I wrote and display it here. He didn’t respond. These are all my words, so I’m going out on a limb and hoping that it’s okay. I just do it because I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written. Lex, if you read this, please be cool with me showing it to others.