Tourist Trap

Preface (20th Anniversary edition)

 Where the heck does the time go? At the moment I'm writing this, it is April of 2024, but soon it won't be anymore. Today, like all days, will quickly recede into the past. Sunrise, sunset. And so it goes.

I finished writing my first book, Tourist Trap, in April of 2004. I don't remember the exact day in April anymore. I wrote it on the last page of the original manuscript I had printed off, but somewhere in the intervening years, I've misplaced that copy. I do remember it was April, though. I was living in Austin, Texas at the time and I remember meeting up with a friend at a bar that night. He had also recently finished writing a book so we took the opportunity to celebrate. Of course, back then I would take almost any opportunity to celebrate. What's that? You say today is National Hog Farmer's Day? Why, that calls for a celebration!

But for reals, finishing writing a book was a pretty momentous occasion. I'd never done it before, and I've only done it a couple more times since. It doesn't happen every day. That's for sure. And writing a book is surprisingly hard work. Despite what some people would have you believe, they actually don't write themselves.

So, yeah. This being April of 2024, and then being April of 2004, that makes this pretty much the twentieth anniversary of Tourist Trap being finished. Twenty years! That's a long time! Also, it makes me feel really old! Twenty years was a big chunk of my whole life in 2004. I actually was around twenty years prior to that, but in April of 1984, I was still in first grade. A lot changes in twenty years, as I've come to find out.

In some ways, it's just a number, but it really does feel like a milestone of some sort, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect back a little bit, both on Tourist Trap and the passage of time in general. I don't know, this could get maudlin and rambly. I'm not sure because I haven't finished writing it yet, but if you're wanting to read Tourist Trap and you just want to skip ahead to chapter 1, I wouldn't hold it against you. There could be a couple mild spoilers here as well, but I'll try not to include too many. Honestly, it's been a long time since I've read Tourist Trap from start to finish and there's probably a lot of stuff I've forgotten. Then again that could just be the early onset dementia.

The beginning of Tourist Trap dates even further back as I started writing it somewhere near the fall of 2001. I want to say the earliest chapters pre-date 9/11 by just a little bit. Talk about the world changing. There was definitely a pre 9/11 world and a post 9/11 world and it may be the old codger in me talking, but I largely preferred that pre 9/11 world. Things just seemed a little nicer and less hectic back then. I'm sure there's a little bit of rose colored glasses involved here, but it really was different.

I remember going on the internet was quite a different experience. A lot of the most popular sites that seem like they've been around forever didn't exist when I wrote this book. Just doing some really quick research, it looks like Facebook started in February 2004, YouTube was launched in December 2005, Twitter started July 2006, the first iphone was released in June 2007... You get the picture. None of this stuff existed when I was writing Tourist Trap. I guess Facebook appeared just a couple months before I finished writing, but at that point, it was a pretty niche little thing for college kids, which I no longer was. At any rate, I certainly hadn't heard of it at the time. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if twenty years further down the road, in April 2044, all of these things sound quaint and dated, if they don't already. That's just the way things go.

I remember having this somewhat misguided notion that all of the best stories had a timeless quality to them, and I wanted to do that for Tourist Trap. I avoided setting it in a specific time thinking that would help it to age really well and hopefully in the future it would still seem "current." Yeah, that kind of went out the window in the very first scene of page one.