Over the last year or so, I’ve been culling a lot of my social media feeds. I’m unfriending, unsubscribing, unfollowing. The reason for this dieting? There’s been a marked shift in the tone of what’s broadcast through my online travel channels. A change of focus, of attitude, of goals underlying the creation of the “stuff” that makes up the corner of the web where I spend most of my time. Lately, I feel like bloggers about travel are driven by a marketing agenda more than a storytelling agenda. I don’t particularly like it.

Let’s cue the “Who are you to judge?” stuff right away, shall we? I’m your reader, that’s who I am. When I feel like you are writing for the marketing and PR department who sponsored your trip more than you are writing for me, your reader, I lose interest. When you are transparently writing for the Google monster and stuffing your posts with garbage that Google likes, I lose interest. When your blog makes me feel like you are more interested in the perks of being a blogger than writing good stories, I lose interest. When I feel like you’re trying to sell me something rather than tell me something useful or interesting, I lose interest. When you place junk links in your content and add popups that ask me to subscribe before I’ve finished reading the post, I lose interest. I am losing interest a lot, lately.

I am one terrifically snobby reader. I will willingly acknowledge that you do not have to write for me, no sir, not at all. I will also willingly acknowledge that a lot of the stuff that causes me to lose interest is increasingly popular because it leads to a certain flavor of success. That flavor of success is so attractive, too, it means plush hotel rooms and airfare to exotic locations and balloon rides over the desert followed by champagne brunches. It leads to a wallet that is not quite so empty, maybe to a book deal or a thriving business model. It is easy to understand why someone would want these things. Hell, I want these things, of course I do.

But pursuing those things looks, in my feed readers, increasingly like a shift towards sponsors at readers’ expense. Instead of asking “What am I giving my readers?” there’s a voice that says “What am I giving my sponsors and what am I getting in return?” Sponsors have become the audience. And the audience, instead of being a readership, has become a potential customer. It’s an extreme analogy, but there’s a creeping used car lot feeling about the travelsphere. We’ve traded in our excitement for personal experience and honest advice for checkered jackets with wide ties.  Travelblogging is for closers. “Let me tell you a story” (or share some great advice) has been replaced by “Let me tell you my sponsor’s message.”

It may surprise you to learn that I don’t think the problem is with sponsorships. I think it’s with the work that results from those sponsorships. It’s in that shift from making readers happy to making sponsors happy. The problem is with pervasive creation of advertorial. With blog posts that read increasingly like brochure copy. I am glad you had an awesome time on someone else’s nickel, now, can you tell me something genuinely interesting, new, insightful, enlightening, peculiar, maddening… about the destination? Or am I just reading about you and your friends (or a group of bloggers) having a good time? Whose voice am I hearing when I read about your travels? Yours or a voice heavily filtered to please a sponsor? When you sit down to write, do you think about who you’re writing for?

It’s common, when casting about the travelsphere, to settle on a “popular” entity and think, “Oh, I want that job.” We think this because we’re focused on the trappings, the travel. It’s less common, I think, to say, “I want to write (or take pictures) like that.” I wince every time I hear, “I’m just a blogger, it doesn’t matter how well I write, I don’t have to focus on that.” (New rule: Anyone who’s dismissive of writing’s role in blogging isn’t allowed to use words anymore.) It’s pretty to imagine ourselves on a patio with a cocktail in golden hour light — the jetlagged writer pinned to deadlines and in difficult edits is not such an attractive image. Writing classes where a teacher nitpicks our grammar are considerably less satisfying in the short run than a check for a sponsorship with a company that will only correct us when don’t use the product name in alignment with the brand guidelines. We want to skip straight to the comped meals and the view hotel rooms without learning about the Oxford comma or narrative arc or that service writing means it’s a service to the reader.

None of this is a particularly new conundrum, it’s just the media that’s newish, and the fact that travel, as a topic for bloggers, has grown enough to be an attractive investment for sponsors. I remember having a panel proposal for a major blogging conference  rejected because travel was “too niche a topic.” Growth is good, though sometimes painful, and I don’t begrudge those selecting the marketing path as their direction; I just stop reading them. I also think it is possible to do sponsored content well. It takes a good relationship with the sponsor and a bravery on the part of the writer. I could point you to my role models for this, but you can probably name your own by asking yourself how you feel after you’ve read a blogger’s work. Do you trust them? Do you think they are honest? Who do you think they are writing for?

What I do regret is that this marketing shift seems to be the dominant method behind travel-blogging madness right now. I crave variety. I crave voices that focus on story, on experience, on the delight of perfectly chosen words. I’m going to name drop and tell you that I had the pleasure of spending time with Don George recently, and I’m also going to embarrass myself by telling you that I kind of whined at him. “I get lonely,” I said, “for the company of people who genuinely care about travel writing purely for the sake of doing good travel writing.”

Photo: Shift by Slack Pics via Flickr (Creative Commons)

I snapped a string on stage last night. The Castaways were playing Loverboy’s Working for the Weekend. It’s a fun song to play, it’s fast and drives, and even though I don’t know how to do the fancy chord progression, I feel like I’m part of it because of the beat underneath. I was hammering on that D chord hard, fast, when the string went. It stung my wrist, sharp and fast, and surprised the hell out of me. The fretboard felt naked without the string there but I couldn’t quit right in the middle of the song. Apparently, I am a consummate professional because I literally did not miss a beat.

When we were done, I leaned into to the mic and said “Can I tell you guys something? I broke a string.”

Everyone in the room burst out laughing and howling and whooping. A lot of PG-13 jokes followed, references to virginity lost, and I confessed to the room of 30 or so people that “I was glad it happened like this, with all of you. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.” Then I skittered off stage to get the extra set of strings I had in my bag (see above under consummate professional!) while the boys carried on.

I did a bad job replacing the string. In my hurry I used the wrong one, I did not wind it properly, and I had it tuned to the wrong key for the first two songs I played when I was back on stage. I have yet to walk away from a show feeling like I have played as well as I would have liked. In my nervousness at the front of the room my hands go to the wrong place or I can not hit the high notes. But while it’s a clumsy weird feeling, it’s also always hugely exciting. The mistakes I make share space in my head with the mad fun of playing live music.

I joke, often, about my fast track school of rock. My lateness to live music, to being in a band, means that I want to do everything, now, to make up for not doing it when I was 22. I want to make calls from a phone booth while a tour bus idles at a truck stop. “Yeah, baby, I miss you too, just a few more weeks….” I joke about getting a regrettable tattoo and writing up a tour rider that includes perfectly ridiculous things like a requirement for organic strawberries dipped in 77% dark chocolate, no more, no less, I swear to god, is it so hard, it says on the label 50%, and that is not what I asked for did you read the contract? I joke about rehab and trashing hotel rooms and rumors of liaisons with professional athletes. I suppose I should want band drama, too, but I honestly, I’d prefer to skip that and stick with the comedic chemistry we have, the absurd email exchanges and rehearsal banter and onstage silliness.

When I snapped that string and had to deal with the aftermath, I did not immediately think, “Oh, this is rock star material, right here, check this off the list.”  I thought, “This is hilarious, this is possibly the funniest thing that has ever happened to me in public.” I joked about it for the rest of the night, about how it was like crossing the rock star equator, and now, I was going to have to get that regrettable tattoo. (I’m thinking an anarchist “A” because unlike what we said publicly, it was not the G string, but the A that snapped. A G string is inherently funnier, so I let the fiction stand.)

Later that night, while we were breaking everything down, a few people asked me what was next, now that I’d broken a string.  I said, again, without missing a beat, “I think I’ll set something on fire.”

I might be joking. But after last night, I think, hey, it could happen.

[Thanks, Barry, for the great picture.]

Why did you start your travel blog? Why are you blogging about travel now? 

In case you’re nervous, know that I don’t think there’s a right answer. I’m not looking for the complicated back story or your personal history of blogging, I’m looking for that iconic elevator pitch, that bare bones one or two lines that explains what’s at the heart of your motivation. I’m tempted to throw in more guidelines, but I don’t want to front load the answers.

So, if you blog about travel, a little help? Keep it super short, two or three lines, as minimal as you can. In the comments, please? And thanks.

I peered through a vertical window into a lab lined with more cardboard boxes, when I leaned on the door it slid inward, just slightly, it was not locked.  In my head I walked in and let the door swing shut behind me, and I started slicing through the tape that kept the boxes sealed, I pulled out more taxidermied critters, battered foxes and tiny birds with iridescent feathers and slid open a drawer full of butterflies all pinned in place.

I was in the “attic” — in quotes, it’s not a real attic — with a group of travel writers from Gadling, a site I write for. We were all gathered in Washington DC for what was essentially a company meeting, but one with a lot of great activities appended to the minimal hours we spent in a stuffy conference room at the Huffington Post headquarters.

We had a guided tour of the Museum of Natural History with a staffer named Margery Gordon,  an enthusiastic woman who’d been at the institution longer than she cared to admit. I loved hearing her talk about her work, and watching her navigate the questions of this know it all group of writers. She pointed out the Pink Fairy Armadillo — it would fit in the  palm of your hand — and the model of Phoenix the Wright Whale, and a few other interesting oddities that you might slide past as you wander the overwhelming main galleries of the museum. She beautifully navigated the question about how the institution deals with creationists (not by punching them, apparently). And she mentioned, just in passing about how they had the dust from the collision of a star…

Or something like that, I don’t remember the words exactly. When she said stardust, I got covered in goosebumps and I lost focus. There, in one of the galleries upstairs and just down that way, was a piece of the sky. Space, in a glass display box, where I could stand and look at it. This woman, in a bright blue shirt and a string of beads and an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of, well, it seemed like the history of everything, works in a place where every day, she can go see the stuff the stars are made of.

I didn’t want her job, not really, but I got dizzy with the temporal shift of it all, that stardust is of an age I can’t begin to grasp, and then, just over there is a replica of tiny Lucy, that humanoid skeleton found in Ethiopia and the floor of time and history tilted sideways, I felt it all slide out from under me.

I’m in a fairly anonymous hotel room right now. This morning I watched the cars jockey their way on to the bridge that crosses the Potomac River. I can see the Washington Monument, and Congress where, for a decade now, maybe it’s longer, there’s been a pretty aggressive politicizing of science. And in the same city, a home to the stars.

I felt a little silly, a little cliche, standing there wrapped in my own trippy emotions. But there was nothing for it. Carl Sagan’s voice was in my head.

“Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. “

My soul feels completely intact after my band played a fantastic show at Seattle’s Greenlake Forza Coffee. The Castaways were the supporting act for a Team in Training/Leukemia Lymphoma Society fundraiser. We played three solid sets of music and while, yes, mistakes were made, even our normally understated bass player admitted to being all whacked on endorphins after it was over. And I was sore the next day, not just from three hours of standing on the concrete floors, but from the jumping up and down. I mean that literally. I was totally into it.

We had two test runs for our new stuff — two weeks prior we’d played an all acoustic set at a gallery party in Poulsbo, and then, the night before this show, we played a private party and focused on all our new work. I felt well prepared and (mostly) confident, but had the usual nerves. I was expecting a lot of friends to show up and I just wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Disappointing strangers is one thing, but playing a bad show for your friends who support you, well, that’s another feeling all together. Thankfully, we had everything going for us. I stand next to that same understated bass player — and towards the end of our second set he leaned over to me and said, “This is the best we’ve ever played, this is our best show so far. This is why we play rock and roll.”

I remain keenly aware of my failings as a musician. I have a squeaky voice that doesn’t carry and I make mistakes, still. But I’m really excited by the obvious progress over the last few months. I feel increasingly relaxed on stage. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I have to make out with the microphone, good lord I hope whoever used it last flossed and took their antibiotics. When I lose my place, I listen until I can find the way back in, and I do not give up. That progress isn’t just mine, it’s collective, it’s in the ridiculous chatter between songs and in hitting the groove and in how it all comes together. At the bar, after we were done, the owner of the cafe shook our hands and said, “I would have you guys play here every night if I could, I just love what you do.”

I am always jittery before and hypercritical after we play, even in practice. I want to be perfect every time, I want to hit every note and I want to stay in lockstep timing and I want it all to come together in a shiny wound balance of string and electricity and metal and scratch and noise. But time is teaching me that I’m not the only one who makes mistakes, I’m not the only one slumping forward over the uke and saying, “@#$*#!!!! I TOTALLY MESSED THAT UP!!!! ARGH! Okay, can we try it again, let’s count it in…” That is hugely reassuring. I am less fearful of failure than I was when I started, not because I have a reached some kind of apathy around my skills but because I have seen — heard — so clearly the evolution of failure into something much, much, better.

A few people have asked me if I’m shifting away from travel writing. I think it’s a fair question and I could see why they’d ask that, given that what I do right now is play music and then, go home and lie in bed waiting for the electrons buzzing around inside my skull to settle, settle down in there, why don’t you? I want to answer no, of course not, of course I’m not shifting away from travel.

But also; the travel itself was never the reason I started writing in the first place, it was always for the writing, the writing was, IS, first.  Now, I write about music, about what it feels like to be in this fast track School of Rock. Instead of writing about what it feels like to be wracked with fever on the way back from Zanzibar or the overwhelming dizziness of reaching the seventh continent, my stories are about how it feels to work really hard on a piece of music and then, the first time you perform it for a crowd, your audience is singing along so loud you can hear them over the amps. (Did you guys hear that? It was amazing!) It feels live, blood throbbing in your fingertips and ears live, your heart in your throat live. Hot night all the windows open radio on flying down the interstate live.

If I’ve shifted, well, it’s not away from writing, not in the least. It’s down to the crossroads; I am taking my ukulele. The devil may get a piece of soul in exchange for music, just like he did for travel. But my words, oh, he’s going to have to sell me his soul and a lot of other things he can’t afford for those. Would you quit writing if you didn’t have travel to write about? While you’re thinking that over, I’ll be busy. I have music to play and writing to do.