The Balance of Food Writing

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Another one of the challenges that I have run into in writing about food is that there are two major philosophies:

  • Reality-based: These are food topics that address things such as hunger, nutrition, economic impact, environmental impact, cultural impact, etc., etc.
  • Lifestyle-based: Lifestyle based, one where the consumers of this media are instilled with the desire for products or unique experiences. This is the Food Networks entire schtick.

These philosophical approaches represent two points on a spectrum when it comes to food media. My challenge is that I see value in both of the points. This, at times, makes me feel wishy-washy, and you can see this awkwardness play out in the candy book, where on one page, I talk about the slave trade and the following pages where I had written light-hearted reviews of candy bars. This is the textbook definition of mood whiplash.

Ignoring this spectrum is treacherous if one wishes to straddle it. And dismissing one out-of-hand ignores the larger system in which it resides - culture. That's where this conversation about food gets interesting to me. That's one aspect that I need to bring into the conversation, but the trick is knowing when it is appropriate.

Security

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To get to know anyone, ask about their childhood because all of a person's neuroses and ticks will invariably come from some aspect of their youth. Obvious, I know, but still important to state.

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't prepared for the step after being published. I should clarify that. 

After the reality of the publishing world becomes known, a writer faces a choice - should I make a go of it? Or is there something about the risk associated with becoming a writer which is too steep to overcome?

(Some of you may have already caught the error in the above questions - namely that there's not a binary option available to writers at that point. The options are up to the writer to determine. But that's not the main point of this post. )

I didn't have a very secure childhood. Divorce and depression had affected my parents substantially but to different degrees. They provided food and shelter to their kids, but at some points, only just. Living for a few weeks without power in the backwoods of Western Pennsylvania wasn't optimal, but transitory. Going to school in clothes chock full of holes and shoes that were falling part, less so.

Did that affect me in adulthood? Absolutely. When given the option to:

A. Pursue a writing career that would require a fair amount of effort to both get better at my craft, and learn and leverage the business surrounding it, but for low wages.

B. Keep my well-paying engineering gig, but put up with varying degrees of politics, business competencies, and fulfilling other people's vision. The odds of remaining there was great (and still is, if I'm honest. I'm still at the job).

When push came to shove, I chose B. I didn't just choose it, I committed to it. And that's when my interest in writing as a career waned, and my productivity nearly zeroed out.

That.Was.A.Mistake.

I'm not just writing it that way for effect, but to specifically call it out. It was a mistake. And I made it for the name of security. There are other variables at play here, but all trace back to the desire to ensure food and shelter. Yes, I was aware of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I ignored it. The need to ensure stability was so prevalent that I stopped doing something I enjoyed doing.

Not surprisingly, I'm not happy. If pressed, I'll cop to being content, at least on my better days. But for the most part, yeah, I haven't been happy with the results. The depression that I thought I had left behind me showed up on my doorstep, and me, like an idiot, welcomed it right in.

So the challenge is now to get back to the point of "happy". But for that to happen, I needed to do some honest assessments. Those assessments resulted in some interesting insights. I will be sharing these with you in the next few weeks and months as I implement some solutions that I have discovered.

The first? Professional writing isn't a binary choice. As with nearly everything else, there are degrees of one's engagement to both the craft and business. We, of free will and drive, have the ability to determine which degree works best for us.

So...stay tuned!

 

A Little Tidbit About My Past

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No. Not that tidbit. That one, well...perhaps another time. This tidbit is far less salacious but may be interesting of note to a few.

Motivation for writing has to come from somewhere.  My motivation for obtaining a book contract was driven by a desire to find the most effective way to visit Europe on somebody else's dime. In fact, there may have been a bet between my friends and myself that could confirm this, if fifteen years hadn't dulled our collective memories. My friend remembers the discussion, but not the bet. Ah well.

Some context is absolutely necessary here, lest you think me boorish and overly privileged. This was roughly 2002, and I had just reached the other side of a physically traumatic health incident.  The costs associated with this had evaporated my savings, and I had just started a temporary job that I thought might lead to more long term employment (It didn’t). An lower-middle class, and yet uncertain future was directly in front of me.

My friends and I sat at a diner around DuPont Circle and pointed this out. “So. What next?” they asked.

 I thought for a moment and said, “I’ve always wanted to go to Europe.”

 It was pointed out to me that money and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye.

I likely shrugged and thought about it for a second or two. “I’ll write a book and use the advance to pay for it. Or the royalties. At a minimum, I could write off the expenses on my taxes.” The idea came out so sudden. I hadn’t shared that idea with anyone up until that point and time.

What my friends should have done was laugh me out of the diner. Either they found the premise reasonable, or if they thought if anyone could do this, I could. It was likely both. Regardless, I took their lack of concern as approval. After that point, I pursued this goal with a fair amount of thought and energy. I spent most of 2003 thinking of a plan, and then implementing it.

This blog was the first step of that plan. The book contract offered in 2007 wasn’t the ends that justified my means. It was the airplane landing in Dublin, Ireland in 2008 that did that. The books published in 2009 and 2012 were almost incidental.

I now hear a few of you groaning to yourself. I get it, I do. I make it sound like this was some sort of lark on my part. I pursued a book deal, not by the need to get words out on the page nor the desire to see my name in print. I pursued a book deal in order to see Paris. It’s perhaps shallow, but it is true.

This is the part where I think I learn my lesson.

First, I learned how much I enjoyed the process of writing. Not the promotion, not the reader interaction, not even the business itself; the process of researching, finding something interesting to say, and then have an 80,000 word product of that effort is immensely satisfying, more so than anything else I have done in my life. I’ve never had a high so much as the one seeing my book in finished format. And note that I have a variety of points of reference that illustrate just how blissful that event can be.

Second, ultimately I think it doesn’t matter what reason one uses to pursue a book deal. Saints and sinners all receive book deals, and ultimately it is up to the publishers to decide what they believe will make them money. Paris Hilton? Book deal. Donald Trump? Book deal. Guy Fieiri? Book deal.

With that being said, my final point is that the quality of my work was very likely affected by being distracted by the entire process, and benefits they afforded. I didn’t quite figure this out until the second book was published. But once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m immensely proud of the books. But I also know they could be improved upon to some degree or another.

This is what I wish to bring to the table on this go around. Call it “intent”, call it “self-awareness”, call it whatever.  But if the challenge here is for me to be happy, then this is most certainly a variable that should be accounted for.

Where I Am At Today

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Some of you may have noticed that my creative output over the past few years could be optimistically called "sporadical." If I am to return to writing for people other than myself, I believe it prudent to explain where I've been, and what it mean beyond that point.

I love posts like these because they afford me the chance to navel-gaze a bit. This is a crucial point to the whole thesis of this post (and any future topic-related posts, and I promise you all nothing) - writing what *I love*. But more on that in a bit.

In the months leading up to the release of the candy book, (buy a copy today!) something happened to my mindset regarding writing, something that I wasn't able to put my finger upon until recently. 

If getting a book contract with a major publisher requires goal setting, a certain level of adaptability, and the ever required level of hard work, then so does shaping one's career after obtaining said book contract.  But here's the tricky bit: what worked during the stage in acquiring the contract would have to evolve in the stages afterward. 

I knew this, to a point. I knew that my writing would have to get better. But how I promoted myself would also have to change, as well as how I sold myself.  And when I compared the level of effort needed when compared to my time available - a variable heavily influenced by my possession of a full-time aerospace engineering job -  I decided to take the easiest path and focus on my already established career. 

My pocketbook welcomed that news. As anyone who has stepped into the professional food writing arena can tell you, as a career is not the most lucrative of endeavors.  There are rare exceptions, of course, but they are rare for a reason.

After this choice - which as formal as it sounds in this post - I pulled back from writing. The world, as it is want to do, moved on without me.

The problem that surfaced from this decision was predictable. My depression reared its head.

My work at the engineering firm was...fine. I wasn't truly overworked, unlike many in the aerospace industries are, and I was (and am) well compensated.

But I wasn't creating anything that could be defined as mine. I never really counted on that aspect of it. Hell, I never considered how much I depended upon that. There's  much to be said for setting challenges for oneself and then developing the processes needed to accomplish those challenges.  What isn't talked about quite as often is the joy and bliss one can find in successfully addressing the problems that pop up in the course of developing a writing career. Let me give you some examples:

Challenge: How does one go about getting a book published? Answer:  Sell them on an idea that the publisher believes they can leverage for a profit.

Challenge: What should a writer do in order to ensure a fair amount of income? Answer: Promote oneself as much as they promote the book. Seek out various forms of media, both pre and post the-dawn-of-the-Internet, and seek out new customers/readers.

Challenge: How do you make yourself happy as a writer? Answer:...

A couple of points on this last question:

  1. While I don't know the solution to this challenge, I do know how you go about accomplishing the first two challenges directly impacts that solution to the third.
  2. All three solutions should be in harmony with one another.
  3. My current theory is that the act of solving the third challenge is the actual solution to the third challenge.
  4. I may be wrong on point 3, but it might be fun to find out.

And this is where I am currently at. I want to see what it would take for me to be happy when pursuing a writing career. I want to challenge every assumption associated with it.

 

 

Sowing the Seeds of Fear

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The title is borrowed from Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times in relation to the Paris attacks of November 13th, 2015. In it, the dear Professor offers a straight up assessment of the situation:

So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.
The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire.

It's easy to look upon the images on the news, and sit, in real-time, on Twitter and Facebook as the events unfurl in front of us.  We end up aghast.  It is easy to let that initial response be our de facto position on this tragedy.  But it is not a sustainable position.

Or, we can tut-tut those who fail to feel equally bad about the tragedies that occur in other nations of the world, including those not often covered by our for-profit, grab-all-headlines-at-any-cost news networks. This approach is also not helpful in any manner other than to allow us to feel more worldly and more informed than others. It does nothing to address the responses others felt as they watched the violence erupt in a city that is culturally significant to many people who don't call France home.

What happened is first and foremost a tragedy, and sadness and disgust are understandable responses.  But we do get to choose how to move on from it.  "Fear" as a response, as Krugman reminds us, is exactly what the perpetrators want. This is evil, through and through.

However, just as evil, is the leveraging of these events for political gain, and to use the pain and sadness of others to justify a position that is at odds with our own. Fear allows this leveraging just as much as seeing the world through some fundamentalist lens.

So what is the proper response to these and other similar events? From my own perspective, I mourn the losses, and understand what is being attacked. Look at the places attacked - a football game, a full restaurant, a rock concert - and ask the following:

"Should I not go to sporting events, concerts, or a restaurant, in order to be perfectly safe?"

All of these places are culturally significant to a great many of us. Do we really want to alter our enjoyment of these places because some fundamentalist with a chip on their shoulder thinks we should feel less safe?

Now let's expand that question a bit - Do we really want to allow these people to alter our behaviors just because they reminded us that life is fragile?  This insight their act provided isn't new to anyone.

From where I am sitting, the only response to these atrocities is to be sad, be brave, and be a citizen of the world. At its core, we are all entitled to what the entirety of life has to offer, regardless of what an idiot with a gun and a dogma happen to believe.

Welecome to Tugoto!

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There's several risks in writing about travel. The reason is both simple, yet complex - there are several philosophies and beliefs surrounding both the idea of travel, and the act thereof.

This is not a bad thing. In fact, it's one of the major reasons that makes travel so compelling. "Travel", as an idea, requires some thought, which inevitably leads to discussion, which leads to introspection.

This is my way of introducing you to this site. It's a travel site - blog at first, and maybe some other stuff later - where I will discuss things of interest to me. I'm going to try to avoid many of the major paths that others have trodden, and try to provide a more in depth approach. Conversations about a city will last months if not years.  The goal?  Create a context and provide some insight into why we go to places, and extract greater enjoyment from these all-to-rare moments in our lives.