Tourist Trap

Author's Note

  First of all I'd like to thank you for reading my goofy little story.  I hope you found it entertaining and had a chuckle or two along the way.  Zeke and Sarah would also like to thank you for reading and Max has kindly offered to take you out to a strip club.  You're paying for the drinks and lap dances, of course.

  I started writing Tourist Trap back in 2001.  I had attempted to start many a book-length work, but could never seem to maintain my interest and would inevitably abandon them before too long.  There was no indication that Tourist Trap would be any different.  I can't say I even had a long-term vision for it when I first started to write it.  I'm not sure what made this one different, but I kind of kept slowly plugging away at it.  After a little while, when I hit 60 or so pages, I realized it was already the longest thing I had ever written.  So I kept going.  There were still times I almost gave up.  Ocassionally I wouldn't write anything on it for several weeks at a time.  But somehow I kept returning to it and puzzling it over in my mind when I wasn't actively writing it.

  I honestly don't know if I would have ever finished it if not for getting some motivation from an unlikely source.  My roommate at the time had a friend who was constantly dropping by our house (and drinking most of my beer in the process.)   I wasn't sure what to make of him at first, but eventually he grew on me.  Like a fungal infection or something.  

  Anyway this fellow happened to be writing a novel at the time, which he mentioned quite frequently.  Whenever he left he declared that he was off to work on his novel.  I didn't put too much stock in it, but then one day he showed up with a 200-something page manuscript and plopped it down on the table and announced he had finished it.  I had actually never met anyone in real life at that point who had written a whole novel (other than probably a couple of my college professors, but they don't count***).

  I have to admit I felt a little bit shown up and slightly embarrassed.  If he could finish writing a book, surely I could.  So I attacked it with a new vigor.  I typed the words THE END in April of 2004 and sat back in a bit of disbelief.  This was in many ways one of the hardest things I'd ever done, but also the most satisfying.  There was also a vague feeling of emptiness in that it felt weird to no longer be writing about the adventures of Zeke, Sarah, Max, and all the other oddballs.  On top of that there was a bit of a feeling of "Okay, now what?"  

  At the same time I was exhausted and felt like taking a break from writing for awhile.  I sent out some query letters to agencies, but got no interest whatsoever.  Sometime in 2005 I attempted to start writing a sequel.  I managed to get about 50 pages into it, but I was starting to get a little discouraged about the whole writing thing.  It didn't seem to make a lot of sense to expend a ton of time and energy into the sequel to a story that nobody had read.  So I kind of just stopped working on it.  

  I wasn't entirely sure what to do with Tourist Trap.  At the time all of the "conventional wisdom" I read said that it was a bad idea to post your book online, so I didn't.  Time passed and I got sidetracked and had to focus my attention on lots of other nonsense.  But in the back of my mind it always bothered me that Tourist Trap was just sitting as a file on my computer gathering cyber-dust.  I had a little extra free time in September of 2013, so I went poking around online and stumbled upon Wattpad.  I went ahead and started posting it and it's been really cool to get comments from some insightful readers, many of whom also happen to be very talented writers.  It would still be awesome to be traditionally published someday, but it makes me happy that people all over the world have read and commented on it here.  I'm happy to say that it's even gotten me inspired to resume work on the sequel, which I'm happy to announce was completed in September 2015.  It's called Doorways to Everywhere and I'm posting it here on Wattpad as well.  

  So once again, thank you!  You are all awesome and I appreciate every comment that you wrote.  If you enjoyed this, I would definitely encourage you to peruse the sequel as well as some of the other shorter work I have posted on here.  Also, I've got Tourist Trap posted on Amazon.com now.  If you enjoyed reading this, please do consider writing a (hopefully positive) review over there.  It would be highly appreciated!  Cheers.

***When I say that my college professors don't count, it is partially because I meant that I'd never encountered a "peer" who had written a novel.  It is also because I don't think professors are really people.  I'm convinced that they are either aliens or robots.  Maybe both at the same time.  Alien robots.