Thank goodness, the eminently reasonable World Hum has published a setting-the-record-straight interview with Thomas Kohnstamm.

It’s very tactful of them to entitle it “The Firestorm around ‘Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?'” and not “The Shitstorm…”

Again, I feel like Thomas is just the extreme version of all of us guidebook writers, or at least of me. This, I can really relate to:

Do you just have to know when to cut your losses?

It’s always hard to surrender. I went into each project with the best of intentions and each time went through the long process of attrition, guilt, freak-out and the eventual bruised acceptance that I would not be able to cover everything in the way that I had planned or hoped. Usually when you look at your backpack and want to cry over the prospect of repacking it once again, you know that you are getting close to your breaking point.

So damn true. In the last few days of research, and again during the writeup, I find myself having to chant “Next edition! Next edition!” over and over again, just as a reminder that it’s not the end of the world that I haven’t got the last scrap of info on the last, tiniest town at the end of the smallest dirt road.

There’s also a good point in there about the difference between writing a guide to the ass of nowhere and writing a guide to a city. In my first post on this whole issue, I intentionally cited my first job for Rough Guides as an overwhelming and impossibly funded venture. But that wasn’t my first guidebook job at all–in fact, I’d already written Moon Metro Amsterdam, a noble first-edition venture that I believe is languishing on just a few store shelves somewhere. Sure, it was a trial by fire to write a million 30-word reviews completely from scratch, and fit them all into an amazingly tight format. But it was fine–I stayed in a single apartment in Amsterdam, a city I already knew very well, for several weeks. When I realized I’d forgotten to get a scrap of info, no problem–I just hopped on my bike and went out and tracked it down.

My Yucatan trip, by contrast, required me to change hotels–and towns–nearly every night, and once I was over on the Gulf coast in Campeche, and realized I’d forgotten to check something in Playa del Carmen, well, too late, toots. That’s the kind of trip that drives you round the bend, and I honestly can’t imagine doing that kind of a book to new territory at this point in my writing career.

I had a truly excellent time working on the Cairo chapter of Lonely Planet’s Egypt book last summer. I allowed myself a full month to research. My husband showed up for part of it. I only changed hotels three times. I had time to talk to lots of interesting people and thoroughly research everything. That job really gave me fresh inspiration for guidebook writing–but it also confirmed that if I’m going to take on any future jobs outside my regular beats, they should be in cities. To that end, I’m working on an Amsterdam guide for Lonely Planet this summer–and I’m really looking forward to it.