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. 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 and music critic, essayist, and playwright, and who has also worked as a copyeditor and 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 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, in Part 1, 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. These will be brief family-friendly chapters (with “edgenotes” for adults) on (at least) twenty-six top cities and sites in Europe, Canada, and the United States, usable as needed depending on your destination. The articles all combine elements of history, culture, attractions, food, shopping, art, and music – from NYC to Nebraska to Lisbon to Paris. It will be a contemporary guide for the pleasure of your historical, armchair, or actual travel.
Review this para – [ TRAVELING SCRIBE, especially Part 1, 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, as the book will show, 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 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 together, which will take several months.
I’m trying to raise $9000. The categories of this Contributor’s Campaign are:
FIRST PART – $5000 – Funds toward my putting together the Microcationers’
guidebook part first 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 expenses along with a renewal of my website.
SECOND PART – Funds toward my being able to custom/partner or self-publishing funds for TRAVELING SCRIBE: A LIFE ELSEWHERE – $4000. 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 digital production, including digital and vintage photos, plus any advertising, (Note: The above figure is based on about 90 percent of the partner publishing costs of other work I’ve been involved in as a cowriter-editor) which will probably also include the Microcationer’s Guide.
Donors of at least $25 will receive one guidebook article. Donations of $50
will receive two articles, $75 three articles. And $100 or more will receive four articles and, insofar as any later publishing arrangement allows, discounts on the final book – or, if only an electronic version is self-published, a free guidebook section, or a half-price combined book. Finally, a $500 or more donation will result in a later free book in whatever form, mention as a supporter of the book, and two of the historical travel articles as they’re written. Of course, feel free to donate as much as you wish. You can also email me follow-up questions on the article/s so I can be your travel advisor – but please note: This does not include text/advice on the latest clubs, events, fees, hotels and pricing, and directions to attractions, all of which are easily available at local hotels or online and, in the case of any entertainment venue not of long standing, vanish quickly.
Articles are light, entertaining, fact-filled blends of culture, history, attractions, often food and music and shopping, family-friendly but with “Edgenotes” for adults and for updates.
The choice of cities will be (for this campaign…there will be many more in the book):
Domestically New York City (outerboroughs and 9/11 historical museum and site), Knoxville, Asheville, Memphis, Austin, Chicago, Boston, Albany, Saratoga Springs, and New Orleans.
In Europe and the UK London, Paris, Rome, Dublin, Edinburgh, Vienna, Madrid, and Lisbon.
Click Below for our online Campaign Shop and choose the articles you want. You will receive an instant download link for each item you purchase.
I’m deeply grateful for whatever you can give to Streetlight Books and to the Traveling Scribe.
– Michael