These items stack up on my desktop, free ebooks and copied posts, awaiting the moment I have time to tap into them – notepad and pen poised.

Somewhere over the Great Plains, I tackled Chris Guillebeau’s 279 Days to Overnight Success, an ebook on becoming a full-time writer I downloaded eight months ago. Boy, did I reap the rewards…

In the recent months, I’ve read a select few ebooks on various topics all relating to my desire to do what I love and get paid to make these activities sustainable. While some have been purely technical and others simply a momentary injection of inspiration, Chris’ points got me buzzing for action. I filled an empty document with so many notes, I had to stop mid-way through to organize the avalanche of thoughts.

Chris outlines the basics of his success for the people he most connects with – the artists, the bloggers and the entrepreneurs – and discusses how he became a full-time writer in 279 days, what income he has earned from his blog, how he establishes his brand and avoids being pulled down by online critics. I found an incredible amount of good ideas from this free ebook, some of which I’ve detail below:

• Continue to put an emphasis on building online relationships with other bloggers and those who express interest in my site
  • Connect using LinkedIn
  • Develop ideas for symbiosis between these online entities
  • Tell those I follow “Thank You” for the work that they do and explain the value I reap from seeing their work
  • Ask my followers why they visit my site and what they perceive to be the value I can offer

• Understand how to use what strengths I’ve got working for me
  • Site the publications that have endorsed my website
  • Promote the posts viewers seem to find more relevant
  • Use what connections I have to leverage my possibilities for income-making endeavors and answer questions about what I don’t yet know
  • Begin turning my most prized information into compact, helpful, entertaining guides or ebooks for possible income

• Redefine the mark of success with my blog
  • Prioritize my time to have writing and creation at the top of the list
  • Nurture my current followers and speak as though I have the number I hope to attract from producing quality content
  • Create more posts on “Why” and further push the direction of my content toward my preferred destination
  • Value constructive criticism but learn to recognize toxic criticism and not let it suck my energy like that one vampire everyone’s obsessed with at the movies

That’s only a fraction of my potential action inspired by this free ebook, not to mention the four new blog posts ideas I came away with.

The 79 pages took me a couple hours to read thanks to all the note-taking and thought-provoking that went on. It’s hard to find or rationalize that time to read such resources, but I definitely found value in checking out Chris’ personal advice on improving what I love to do.

Read Chris’ ebook on Online Success for yourself

Has anyone else read Chris’ manifesto on full-time writing yet? What was your reaction, and did you find any value in his words?

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So before I even picked up its predecessor, Into the Wild, I was on Krakauer’s side and knew it would be a story deeply connected to my own.

After holding off watching the movie for a year [hoping to read the book first], I finally caved and let tears soak my cheeks as I watched Chris McCandless follow a desire that couldn’t be silenced. Since the book came second, I fear the story’s impact was compromised, but only by a fraction.

The Storyline

Starting from the book’s cover, the outcome is apparent to the reader: the protagonist, a 24 year-old Emory graduate, dies in the Alaskan wild. Where does the story unfold from here?

Krakauer reveals the perspectives of the people who became integral parts of McCandless’ quest: the electrician who dropped him at the mouth of the Stampede Trail in Healy, Alaska; the hunters who found his body in an abandoned bus; the jack-of-all-trades who employed and befriended him in South Dakota throughout the two year journey; an old man from California who felt so connected as to ask to be his guardian; and the tormented family still writhing in painful loss at home in Virginia.

It’s an investigation where the main mystery is the state of the human condition, and the reader asks, “What compelled Chris?” It is through the tales of these personal encounters with McCandless that the reader can decide if he was narcissistic and stupid or in touch with something most of us don’t fathom.

McCandless mailed many letters to road friends and kept journals and written thoughts, which help the reader deduce further his mental state. One such letter to his friend, Ron (the older man whom McCandless met in Salton City, California), illustrates his passion to inspire those bound by habit to security to do something invigorating:

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”

The Author’s Presence

Not only does Krakauer question these real-life characters in their surroundings but describes every landscape and lifestyle vividly, enough to prove he’s been there and absorbed McCandless’ experiences viscerally.

If the craft and accuracy of his writing aren’t enough to prove Krakauer is the right person assigned to the story, then the final affirmation comes from his own stories about paternal relations and outdoor challenges of the body and soul that relate to McCandless.

It’s through his own solo experience in the Alaskan wild, climbing the Devil’s Thumb and traversing the Stikine Ice Cap, that Krakauer impresses the drive of man’s primal allure and connection to that which has great potential to kill him.

“All that held me to the mountainside, all that held me to the world, were two thin spikes of chrome molybdenum stuck half an inch into a smear of frozen water; yet the higher I climbed, the more comfortable I became.

“…But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.”

Many say McCandless took on more than he could handle and underestimated the magnitude of Mother Nature, but had he survived [and sidestepped his tiny, fatal mistake] would people have considered him so childish?

Krakauer inspires the question: is survival the test of someone’s philosophical or inexplicable purpose?

Chris’ Art of Travel

The moral of the movie, the essence of the narrative, what McCandless sought for those two years as a vagabond is a means to happiness. If you don’t mind a good spoiler, these two excerpts demonstrate the evolution of his viewpoint from journey to final words:

[In his letter to Ron while en route to Alaska] “You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living…”

[Referring to a margin note in Doctor Zhivago by Boris Paternak, the last book he read] “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”

The Bottomline

What was certainly magnified by Krakauer’s text was the reality that we humans harbor primordial desires, and it’s on a sliding scale how much we allow these feelings to be heard and acted upon.

It is my belief that travelers, adventurers, nomads and those hopeful to detach from the man-made structure of modern civilization are more responsive to those “calls of the wild.” Unconventional living forces a constant reevaluation of one’s life [and one's mortality], and when we are closer in mindset to our own expiration, it seems we connect closer to the motivations of our primitive ancestors.

Thanks to the realities described by Krakauer, we can assume this man died understanding a lesson that seemingly takes half-centuries to comprehend; one could call it a priceless lesson, but since his life was the cost, was it justified?

Case in point, it’s a good book. Read it.

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-I love to travel. I need to make an income. Should I then be a travel writer?

-In what ways does my writing need help before it’s ready to be sent out?

-If I love to write about travel, how do I push my way into the industry?

-What should I charge or expect as compensation as a newcomer?

-I need resources, contacts, wisdom from the greats…where can I find all this?

Even before I reached the half-way point of this book, I was recommending it to these fellow travelers. In regards to travel writing, photography or videography, the rules don’t seem all that cut-and-dry, especially when you’re dealing with intellectual property.

Fresh out of college and yet to begin a full-blown career, how do we value our own work, especially at something for which we didn’t receive formal training? Unfortunately, I didn’t realize during school that I would ever need skills in journalism. I actually believed (and still do to a lesser extent) that learning journalistic tricks would make my writing process more mechanical and less organic and honest.

But, after reading Lonely Planet’s Travel Writing book by Don George, I am now more aware of the rigors of the profession, the courtesies that are known but often go unspoken, the necessary steps toward success and that I can still retain my writing style if I understand the needs of publishable travel articles.

It’s not for everyone

Don George begins by subtly discouraging those who just love to travel from writing about travel for a living. He makes the very necessary statement that travel writing is still writing, and even the most fantastic trip or experience cannot carry itself in a poorly crafted article. For many, travel writing isn’t the expected dream job because the majority of a writer’s time can be spent fact-checking on location and soaring through cities like a blur, not in the manner in which most people love to travel. And if you couldn’t write before the trip, there’s not much hope in selling that trip’s documentation afterward [without monumental amounts of editing, of course].

Luckily, a longstanding passion of mine is writing (I’d be pretty bummed about now if it weren’t). Previously, I leaned on the place to do the talking and not the craft of writing. It’s about being a wordsmith and a storyteller, not just a globetrotter with a pen. And from George’s explanation of the laborious lifestyle, I realized I’m not opposed to slaving for the work if I continue to reap such happiness from its quality completion.

The Art of the Story

George describes at length, over the course of three chapters, what makes a quality piece of writing and how to harness such skills: write a lot and read good writing. It’s a theory pounded into the reader over and over by not just the author but by the vast majority of interviewees from the publishing community highlighted in this book. One specific tip that resonated with me was about the difference between what you document and what belongs in a diary:

Writing about everything you did on holiday should be kept strictly between you and your diary; you need to find the theme that will interest an editor…Ask yourself this question: what most impassioned you? …What’s the first story that comes to mind [from your trip]? Focus on that story, because for some reason your internal filter has decided that that particular story embodies the quintessence of your trip.

While I don’t often scribble down every activity of a trip, I have the problem of focusing too heavily on my inner landscape, my mentality during the trip and how I responded to the place of my physical presence. Though this can often be useful insight for a piece, it can also take away from the most interesting meat and potatoes of a trip that would interest a stranger, not just a writer’s mother.

Journalism Elements to Implement

Prior to reading this book, I sensed the following points were important, points that were then reiterated and accentuated to the point of absolute necessity thanks to this book:

-Be accurate with your facts and numbers, or people won’t hire you.

-Find a specialty in travel writing where you become an expert and the indispensable resource in that field for publications

-Use dialogue, describe characters and bring all senses to life.

This list could easily expand, but I guess you’ll just have to read the book to hear the rest.

The Publication Game

Without the chapter on getting published, I wouldn’t know how newspapers, magazines, websites, book publishers and agents worked – information which proves pivotal for knowing what’s plausible. A writer unattached to a certain publication must tap into many of these arenas simultaneously in order to make a solid income. There are courtesies to note when submitting articles and characteristics you must exhibit to get your work published. More tips include:

-Know that magazines work months to a year in advance. Approach them about a story to be published way down the road.

-Understand that some contracts will compensate for your newspaper article in print but not for its addition to the newspaper’s website.

-Be aware of the advantages when using an agent to get a book published.

And then the Practicalities

Though I found the “Tools of the Trade” chapter to be stating the obvious, George delivers for Lonely Planet the truths behind writing for guidebooks. The much-appreciated explanation on royalties and fees brought my attention to something I hadn’t yet thought about much: reusing material from previous work for future work. Though it seems one should always write specifically for a publication or audience, some work can be regurgitated if the writer retains ownership. And of course, George reiterated the rigors of fact-checking, which are compounded for guidebook researchers. Without the luxury of time, the sheer number of establishments in a city or region seems like a daunting task for documentation.

The last forty-seven pages supply online publications, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses all with an interest in travel, as well as resources like a sample model release form.

The Bottom Line

If you skipped out on journalism classes in college, this may be a great resource for an aspiring travel writer, or writer in general. I used my highlighter selectively (yet, often) and plan on keeping my copy to continue my education on the topic. I’m anticipating using it frequently as a guide to starting my freelancing career. And so should you (smile and wink).

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JanSport describes itself as “the Original Outdoor Gear Brand that embodies a culture of fun and discovery. We equip people globally with quality, enduring and reliable products that enable the freedom to experience life’s adventures.” I’m here to tell you if they delivered on this promise.

The Bag – Air Kirkwood (TQK1)

“Our goal at JanSport is to design, engineer, manufacture and market products that can help you get from point A to point B, wherever that may be.”

My points A and B were the same place: home. The route between them was one heading westward across the Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and America. The Kirkwood bag needed to last those 38,322 miles and still make me look stunning. The bag functioned as a laptop case, a camera case, a filing cabinet, a plane nighttime bag, a library, and oh so much more. It was always my carry-on piece and was able to carry nicely the 10 pound maximum sometimes enforced on certain airlines.

Let’s take a look at the details, shall we?

AirLift™ shoulder straps

Padded by a solid gel-like matter, referred to by JanSport as AirLift, the straps held the loads nicely by distributing the weight across their wide surface. Curving and contouring to the body, they didn’t cut into my underarms or back of the neck.

One large main compartment

In this middle, main pocket, I normally held my books, DSLR and HD cameras, clothing, or larger items purchased out and about. I always had to be careful setting it down because the bottom isn’t padded at all, but I don’t suspect many backpacks have this feature. I often filled this, as well as all, compartments to the brim and never did the zippers snag or malfunction in any way.

Organizer compartment with dual accessory pockets

The dual accessory pockets were great for pens or an old school Nokia phone, but I especially liked the central zip pocket perfect for storing extra coins from world currencies. They didn’t clutter up the floor of my bag, and I believe me when I say nothing gets me more urked than reaching into my bag and fingering through undergrowth of pen caps, food, coins, and gum onto get a rogue crumb lodged under my finger nail. Pure hell.

Quilted sleeve fits 15″ laptop

The laptop(s) always slept soundly in this rear compartment, which obviously had adequate padding (though I sometimes worried about the bottom of the bag and the impact of placing it on the ground. It’s also a nice place for folders and papers.

Fully padded back panel with ventilation channel

The center of the backpack’s back has a little air canal amidst mounds of padding for your left and right shoulder/lat areas.

Tricot lined V-loft pocket

I don’t know what that description is really talking about, but I enjoyed the soft lining and convenient positioning of the pocket on top. Quite shallow and easy to access, this was perfect for ear plugs, eye cover, aspirin, and anything else I utilized on transportation. Large enough to hold iPods and decks of cards, I really appreciate any bag with a little specialized pocket, for which you can apply a much-needed purpose.

Side water bottle pocket

Also good for catching dirty tissues when your hiking with the swine flu, roll of toilet paper in hand.

Reflective details for nighttime visibility

Yes, this bag can see in the dark.

Side compression straps keep pack close to the body and manage the load

These straps certainly keep the load to the body for enhanced movement, and they also create instant cleavage.

Padded grab handle

When this bag is packed to it’s 30.32L capacity, it can be a little too much load for one feeble and travel-weary back. That’s when having a padded grab handle comes in handy. Without cutting into your hand as you walk around the airport or museum, you can only blame your discomfort on your poor upper-arm strength.

The Pro/Con Balance

How many runway models, jet-setters, and local inhabitants do you see wandering around cities with backpacks on if they’re not business men who bike or obviously going/coming from school? Not many. In certain destinations, backpacks are incredibly vulnerable to petty crime (e.g. bag slashing in Zanzibar’s Stone Town). In others, it’s just an easy indicator of an out-of-towner, and this sometimes-unavoidable distinction can create more difficulties for the toter.

However, wandering Kata Tjuta’s massive, red formations is a perfect opportunity to utilize a bag like the Air Kirkwood. And what was beneficial for me, someone who likes having all their valuables and entertainment nearby, was the fact that the two straps put the load across my entire back and not on one shoulder (like a messenger bag would). Not to say this bag didn’t add stress to my frame, but evening out the load makes things much easier on an already fatigued back.

A backpack is, well…to put it brilliantly, a backpack: it must be taken off to be inspected; it can never come across as a purse or a man bag; it immediately makes any ensemble look sporty or ultra-casual. It all depends on how you function on your travels. If you’re always running across rocks and plains, hiking up clay-like mud heaps and carrying heavy loads, the Air Kirkwood would fit your needs quite well. However, it’s no fun placing your backpack on your front when walking through a crowd or a notorious area for petty crime. Museums hate backpacks and make you store it or hold it at your side.

It’s also something to think about how your day pack is carried when you wear your large backpack. I found my combined JanSport Klamath and Air Kirkwood duo was quite uncomfortable while in transit, and I wouldn’t want to walk around a city or even an airport too long like this.

The Real Travel Situations

Even fully loaded, this bag fit in every overhead compartment and under every seat in front of me.

The lack of accessories on the front of the pack enable this surface, as well as the padded back, to be used as an impromptu pillow while waiting for transportation or trying to sleep on a plane.

A travel partner in South Africa, to put it nicely, blew chunks (maybe that wasn’t such a nice way to put it) all over this fully packed bag. It came out victorious, barely soaking in any of the moisture and keeping my articles dry.

After washing the bag for the first time in the washer, it came out smelling like dirty feet. I don’t know what that was about…

Bottom Line

JanSport delivers on their product mission of designing, engineering, manufacturing and marketing products that get you from A to B, accentuating quality, endurance and reliability, and they certainly do “equip people globally,” as I’ve seen children across India, Africa and America carrying their classic backpacks. When this item was put to the test this summer, it proved victorious on virtually all accounts, except for maybe a versatility factor. You definitely can’t seamlessly go from the farm to a chic club with this bad boy.

Did this product review help you out? Comment below!

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