Monthly Archive June 18, 2014

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ByGD
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The Rendezvous

Rendezvous Pondicherry

The Rendezvous Restaurant

Before there were blogs, I spent a quarter studying sustainable development in southern India. I maintained an email distribution list of friends who wanted updates on my travels. Many nights involved entertainments of the herbal or alcoholic kind; there were roof-top full-moon parties and midnight swims in the ocean (the garbage floating there was harder to see in the moonlight); some evenings were spent on planting plans and composting toilet design. But occasionally, I sat down at a computer and wrote about my adventures. This is one of those stories:

Everyone says it is much easier to meet people in India. I don’t know whether it is India, or just the openness that one adopts when traveling, but I have certainly been meeting people lately.  Read More

ByGD
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The Bookslut Travel-writes Dangerously

I apologize. Once again, I ask you to work for a reblog. But I think this one is worth it. It’s a short piece, but manages to cover a lot of ground without feeling dense. If you like any of the things I usually write about here, you’ll probably find something to like in this post on the Bookslut Blog.

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ByGD
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Book Report: The Greenhouse

the greenhouse book coverThe Greenhouse, by Audur Ava Olafsdottir, is instantly appealing, so it’s no surprise that Amazon Crossing chose to release Brian FitzGibbon’s translation. Its shy, modest protagonist has spent the years or so since his mother’s death caring for his aging father, his autistic twin brother, and his mother’s greenhouse, where he has cultivated a rare eight-petaled rose. Now he is leaving to take a job restoring the rose garden of a medieval abbey in an unnamed European country.

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ByGD
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May by the Numbers

photo by Gratisography

Once upon a time, this blog was just a place to direct potential editors to see a fairly recent example of my writing. If I posted monthly, it seemed like enough. Over time, I built up a few followers anyway (thanks!) and began to enjoy the occasions when something I wrote sparked someone’s interest. As I contemplated the shift to freelancing full-time, I began to research potential income streams and avenues of writerly activity, and discovered a whole world of people who live off their blogs. Some of them are delightful and I read them every day. Many of them are awful, and I can’t imagine how gaming the SEO system to drive unsuspecting browsers to these ugly, ad-laden, content-sparse pages could benefit anyone.

I still think of this blog as a place to explore ideas without an assignment and introduce myself to potential editors, but since quitting my day job, my blog stats have begun to take on a new urgency.

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ByGD
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Bend in the Road

Crooked Road Gemma tattooI named this blog Crooked Road after a line from one of my favorite movies, Joe vs. the Volcano.

It’s been a long time coming here to meet you – a long time, on a crooked road.

The line is delivered while floating on a steamer trunk in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s hardly what most people would call a destination. It’s almost the perfect opposite of having ‘arrived.’ Joe and Patricia are floating on that trunk after having been ejected from a sinking volcano – as unexpected a turn of events as one could probably imagine. The scenario certainly qualifies as a sharp bend in a crooked road. The scene is a wonderful illustration of the philosophy that life is a journey we can’t quite plan. As long as it continues, each step of the way is as much a destination as any other.

All this is a convoluted and referential way to announce that against all logic, I have quit my day job. Read More

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