Talking Points

Today I was giving a presentation to my motorcycle group on successfully blogging about your trips. It went pretty well and I hope everybody came away with something. I’ve been blogging now since about 2002. I started off talking about independent filmmaking and writing for independent film. Of course this also began to cover my experiences both positive and negative over the years right up until the somewhat bitter end of that part of my writing life.

For the two years after that where I wasn’t writing anything except on this blog, it became a lot about riding my motorcycle and photography (one of my other real passions). It was a decent outlet and for the most part I tried to keep it free of my rage. Which was pretty hard as I was still pretty angry. When I decided to start writing books again it was pretty obvious I’d be posting about that as well.

I think my main point today was that no matter what, life is a story and everybody likes a good story. While the bulk of my travel tales don’t involve crossing Africa, Siberia or the Mongolian steps. I do like to focus on the beauty, sometimes staggering beauty of Canada and the US. How it really is the journey and the people you meet that make it special. How my experience has been that 10 times out of 10 people want to help when you’re in trouble. Now this just might be a brotherhood of bikers thing but I think that’s too narrow focus. I’ll just keep on thinking people at their core are good.

I do find the people or at least some of the guys in my group find it a bit weird that I am a writer because it’s such an esoteric pastime. You get the usual questions, “Where do you get your ideas?” and such but today I got asked one that sort of stumped me. “How do you write?” As in how do I transfer what’s in my head onto the page. And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure. Like most writers I have a process. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not the same for every project. Most things I will outline, based on the thought or an idea that I’ve had. Other times, like this blog post I’ll have a vague idea and then I’ll just wing it. I like to keep this blog as raw as possible and try not to censor myself. After all in many ways this is a journal and a pretty good record of what I’m going through or thinking about or mulling over at any given point relative to the date. For me that’s part of living an honest life. I simply don’t have time for all that subterfuge and bull shit that so many people seem to revel in or the very least splash through.

So I guess the gist of my presentation today was above all else be honest on the page and let people see the real you because that’s where the power is.

As always you can find my thrillers Devil's Gambit and Reliance on Amazon.