Battered and Fried

It’s the end of the year and my blogging frequency on this site is showing it. A lot of bloggers bitch more the more stressed they get. I just go quiet.

My trip to South America was great, but perhaps a bit ill-conceived. I gave myself a week’s break in between three weeks in three different cities in China in October and three weeks in six different cities in India in November. And then gave myself four days between India and two weeks in Chile and Argentina. Didn’t follow that? Yeah, try living it. One of those four days in town was spent cooking a Thanksgiving for ten at my house. (Full disclosure: My mother-in-law actually did most of the work.)

My immune system has held up amazingly well all year through some 25 weeks or so spread across nine different trips in six different countries. But it finally succumbed to a stupid cold in Argentina. I think it was more fatigue than anything. No sooner would I get in a moving vehicle or sit down in my hotel than I’d slip into unconsciousness.

This has been a trend over the last few months. Vivek Wadhwa marveled as I slept for several hours on one of the bumpiest roads in India, and Allen Taylor, of Endeavor, compared me to one of those old farmers who sit down, lean their head back and start snoring as soon as they get in their favorite chair. (I have a penchant for finding sleep wherever I can get it.)

Still, I fell in love with South America (as I tend to do with most places) and met some great entrepreneurs. I’ve written a ton about them on TechCrunch lately, if you want to know more go here. As is the trend with this book, many of them are building businesses so intense and improbable they make launching an iPhone app look like a playground game. The biggest challenge is deciding what to publish now and what to squirrel away for the book.

In less than a week, I’ll be on a plane again, but this time going to my hometown, Memphis, for the holidays. While Mr. Lacy races around the tri-state corner of the South taking photos, I’ll be busy writing. I am forcing myself to write 30,000 words of my book by the end of the year. I’ve got about 10,000 done now. One word for that: Woof. Watch Twitter for signs that I’m distracting myself from the task—I mean, watch for updates on my progress.

I will take four days out to roundly smack-down anyone who says Nashville is a better city, and now that the dates have changed from Dec. 31-Jan. 3 to Dec. 27-30, it even overlaps nicely with my 34^th birthday.

Thirty-effing-four. I’m telling you I look every bit of it after this year of travel. I also have an interesting collection of scars, bites, bruises and scrapes from life in all these far flung places. A lot of mornings of yelling “Good Lord! Where’d I get THAT?” in various hotel showers. But I wouldn’t trade it. Seeing the world and meeting thousands of its entrepreneurs over the last year have permanently changed my worldview and changed me as a person. It’s a good kind of pain. I mean—assuming I do actually get this book done by next August. Not totally sure I won’t yet wind up kidnapped, in jail or in an insane asylum.

Oh, I’m sort of burying the lead here, but I’m no longer doing a column for BusinessWeek. My contract elapsed just as the Bloomberg acquisition was happening and not only has the person who requisitioned my column quit, but every on-staff and contract columnist has been let go. So, not a shock, it didn’t get renewed.

I don’t know if I’ll pick something else up. It is a sudden and worrisome hole in my income, but I’ve also got eight months and six more trips to go on this book and the fewer distractions the better. I’ve invested too much of my own money, my youth, my time, my health, my marriage-well-being and my blood in this book not to make it the best it can be. One less distraction may be a blessing in disguise.

Oh, I have another buried piece of news. The Kauffman Foundation-- one of the largest non-profits in America whose job is to champion entrepreneurship-- gave me a nice grant to support the current book. I probably haven't mentioned it, because I was so stunned by the generosity and show of support for the project that it almost seemed too good to be true. But I've already started spending their money and the check hasn't bounced so I guess I'm not dreaming. Given, the lack of BusinessWeek income, they've pretty much saved the project, so thanks Kauffman!