Help me create an extraordinary travel book – and stay at home.
I’m Michael Eric Stein and Streetlight Books has been my imprint since 2014 for my published and self-published books and for links to my professional print, photo, and video journalism.
I now need your help to maintain Streetlight Books’s website and home office, but mainly to produce a travel book unlike any other.
The goal for Streetlight Books is to raise enough funds to complete and if need be “custom”/partner publish with an established publisher, or to entirely self-publish, a combination travel memoir/mini-guidebook with new and vintage photographs, TRAVELING SCRIBE: A LIFE ELSEWHERE and HERE IN THE WESTERN WORLD: A MICROCATIONER’S GUIDE TO SELECTED CITIES IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE. I’ll also need to keep the website and home office going until at least 2027, or, if necessary, afford a move.
I am a veteran professional writer who has been published and produced as a screenwriter, TV writer, journalist/photojournalist/videojournalist, novelist, film critic, essayist,and playwright, and who has also worked as an editor and copy editor. My writing has appeared in NYC’s Daily News, NYC’s Films in Review, the Westside LA Times, and a variety of travel-related magazines. Two of my articles won first and third place Hawaii State Publishers Association p’ai awards for Maui No Ka Oi Magazine. I also was, with principal writer Carla Gambescia, the editor and co-writer (credited on the cover) of LA DOLCE VITA UNIVERSITY, a guidebook on Italy published by Travelers’ Tales and winner of a Silver Medal Award in the guidebook category of the North American Travel Writers Association. The book is now in its second edition.
My travel memoir, TRAVELING SCRIBE: A LIFE ELSEWHERE will recount, based on my original still extant journals and photos, over forty years of travel, in part as a lover of travel who did it whenever he could, in part doing research as (in the 1980s–early 1990s) a TV writer and screenwriter.
World’s Fairs. The original Woodstock Festival. The fall of the Wall in Berlin and the opening up of East Berlin and Prague. Morocco. Tanzania. Alaska. Five years in Hawaii. This part of the book will be a sometimes rollicking, sometimes dramatic travel memoir including, for example, a near-Moroccan-“Midnight-Express” incident, being marooned in the mud on an African road during an “adventure travel” photo safari, and joining as a journalist a Hawaiian spiritual access visit to the uninhabited island of Kahoolawe.
The second section of the book, covering 2012 to the present – based on adapted published articles for which I have reuse rights, and my own photos – will be a ‘dippable’ and ‘edu-taining’ mini-guidebook HERE IN THE WESTERN WORLD: A MICROCATIONER’S GUIDE TO SELECTED CITIES IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE. (This may instead be published separately). These will be brief chapters on (at least) twenty-six top cities and sites in Europe, Canada, and the United States, usable as needed depending on your destination. Articles are light, entertaining visitors’ introductions to the cities they’re about—mainly fact-filled blends of culture (lots of art and music), history, attractions, often food and shopping, family-friendly but with “Edgenotes” for more adult info, personal asides, and updates—from NYC to Memphis to Lisbon to Paris. It will be a contemporary guide for the pleasure of your historical, armchair, or actual travel.
The TRAVELING SCRIBE travel history memoir will also be, in brief segments that connect the travel passages, about historical and personal events that backgrounded the travel experiences and the thoughts and feelings those places aroused within me. As you read this book – both the travel memoir and the guidebook about specific places to visit – you’ll recall travel. You’ll imagine travel. You’ll hopefully prepare for real travel in your life – its delights, its stresses, its roadblocks to be overcome (with whatever tips I can provide), its rewards. For me the act of traveling became a story in itself, and engendered a view of the world and my experiences drawn from a writing and traveling life, where recreation became re-creation, where what to most people were welcome vacation diversions from their real life became real life for me, for both troubling and happy reasons, reasons that can be instructive, consoling, enjoyable, even perhaps uplifting for others.
In short, TRAVELING SCRIBE and the MICROCATIONER’S GUIDE will recall the adventure of travel of decades past – and this fund drive will help avoid or at least postpone the disruptive adventure of a move in the present while I write and put the whole book project together, which will take several months.
I’m trying to raise $8500 The categories of this Contributors’ campaign are:
I’m trying to raise $8500 The categories of this Contributors’ campaign are:
FIRST PART – $5000
Funds toward my putting together the MICROCATIONER’S GUIDE part first and preparing for its ultimate publication because it’s basically already written and photographed. I would also be using the funds for paying debts on a new computer, peripherals, training, and software; for a percentage of lost freelance income incurred during the production of the book; and to provide help with living and medical expenses.
SECOND PART – $3500
Funds toward my being able to custom/partner or self-publish TRAVELING SCRIBE: A LIFE ELSEWHERE and the MICROCATIONER’S GUIDE. A traditional publishing deal with an advance is highly unlikely. If I can obtain a “custom publishing” arrangement, that will require me to partner with the publisher financially, including for the advertising. If I have to self-publish, I will need to furnish all the funds for every phase of the book’s paperback and/or digital production, including digital and vintage photos, plus any advertising. (Note: The above figure is based on about 70 percent of the partner publishing costs of other work I’ve been involved in as a cowriter-editor – I’m sure costs have gone up since).
HOW IT WORKS
Microcationers Guidebook Articles are available for Contributions of $25 each.
Choose from the Titles available in the Campaign Shop.
• Contribute $100 or more for four or more articles and also receive, insofar as any later publishing arrangement allows, discounts on the final book – or, if only an electronic version is self-published, a free guidebook, or a half-price combined set of the two books.
• Finally, generous contributors of $500 or more will receive at least one later free book in whatever form, mention as a supporter of the book, and two of the historical travel memoir articles as they’re written.
Simply go to the Campaign Shop, select the articles you want, and click on the Add to Cart buttons to make your Contribution and receive immediate download links for the articles.
Of course, feel free to contribute as much as you wish. You can also email me follow-up questions on the article/s and I’ll try to provide more travel advice. Please note: The articles do not include the latest clubs, events, fees, hotels and pricing, and directions to attractions, all of which are easily available through local hotels or online and, in the case of any entertainment venue not of long standing, vanish quickly.
The choice of cities will be (for this campaign… there will be many more in the book):
Available Now:
London, Paris, Lisbon, Chicago, Memphis
“Your Microcation” choices:
Domestic Destinations: Knoxville, Asheville, Austin, Boston, New Orleans.
Europe and the UK Destinations : Rome, Dublin, Edinburgh, Vienna, Madrid.
I’m deeply grateful for whatever you can give to Streetlight Books and to The Traveling Scribe.
– Michael