Road Trip!
Post-Trip Review: The End of the Road
Alakazam!
Note: This is the eleventh in a series of posts describing my effort to get letters published in newspapers in every state and territory of the U.S.A. You can read the whole series here.
As I was gearing up to create a Fourth of July astroturf-inspired letter, two letters that had been in newspaper slush piles for a week or so were suddenly published in multiple newspapers. These two letters had the distinction of describing actual events with no embellishment other than my use of a fictional street address.
O’Charley’s. It’s O’Charley’s.
First, an account of a dream I actually had one night. In most of my obviously humorous letters I go for a tone of high hilarity. With this one I went for a subdued, worried tone. I wish I knew whether the editors chose it as an example of genuine pandemic worry, or if they knew it was a joke. I mean, the dream was real enough, but I didn’t really feel the stress over it as portrayed in the letter. I like to imagine a reader getting all worked up to read some political jousting in the letters section, only to find this thing about my dream.
Oh well. Ink is ink.
Original text in a blog post. Note my conspicuous use of all major pronouns when referring to the manager.
As it appeared in the Billings Gazette.
As it appeared in the North Platte Telegraph.
As it appeared in the Lewiston Tribune.
As it appeared in the Daily Star. Louisiana had been really tough to crack. I tried all kinds of timely and topical letters on them with no luck. Clearly, there was a hitherto undetected demand for something about previously-gnawed orange peels.
There’s a G*ddam App for That!
Perhaps it is fitting that the final letter on my road trip was a bit of Americana and a true tale. My experiences were at Atlanta Braves games at Turner Field, but aside from that they were exactly as described in the letter.
As it appeared in the Herald-Palladium.
As it appeared in the Cape May County Herald.
As it appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican.
With that, I achieved my goal of nationwide publication. I stopped writing letters.
It was hard to stop. What had started off as a sideline had grown to consume all of my writing time, every day. I loved reading all the newspapers from all over and researching the towns and looking at maps and satellite images. What had started off as a great unknown and a sometimes-tedious slog had, thanks to experience and organization, become a delightful and interesting hobby. I had the research, writing, submission, and publication capture process down to a science and it felt quite natural and easy.
I felt like I had actually been to many of the places I researched. But I had set aside all of my other writing projects and they were calling out for me to work on them.
Maybe someday, when I have reached the ends of other roads in my writing, I will return to this dear road with no predetermined end in mind.
I will just be on an eternal road trip, visiting newspapers and towns online, basking in the there-ness of other places, getting some ink and hoping to spark a laugh or two along the way.
Boing!