This is an accountability post. I’m writing a book, theoretically. I’m also logging the time I’m spending on it, which means I can see things like “just over an hour and a half of writing in all of 2025 so far”.
The trouble is that it’s for fun, which means when I’m busy, it just drops right off the bottom of my priority list. It’s hard to find the motivation to sit down and plough some serious hours into writing when you’ve barely got time to eat most evenings. Maybe if I had any financial motivation to write, that might get me putting ink to paper (well, fingers to keyboard) but this is a passion project and I don’t have the passion right now.
Its terrible working title is “The Bath Book”. My first book started off as “The Little Book of the Arctic” so I’m not panicking yet about not having a proper title but if you have any suggestions, I’m all ears. Ever since I had the idea for this, which has now been at least a few years, nothing better has come to mind but I’m hoping a phrase or a theme or an idea will pop out in the writing – another reason to get on with it!
Ok, it’s about baths. Baths, steam, hot water, bathing culture. I’ve got geothermal pools in Iceland, Finnish saunas, Hungarian thermal baths, Georgian sulphur baths and German thermes. I’d like to go to Türkiye for a chapter on Turkish baths & hammams but that’s just a little beyond my solo female travel courage at the moment. There’s also the UK chapter – definitely featuring both the Roman baths at Bath and the Roman- inspired baths at Bath. Plus probably the hen party that started it all. Maybe the beach sauna as a contrast to the Finnish saunas, maybe an actual bath, since the UK has a mania for these that most other nations do not share. We blame the cold damp climate for our love of hot baths but you don’t see the Scandinavians or other northern mainland Europeans raving about baths, and they share the damp cold climate.
This afternoon – ok, yesterday afternoon by time of publication – I had something of a revelation, which is that I do want to include the places I found baths in as well as the baths themselves. I’ve never been entirely sure. Is there any point in talking about Tbilisi when what I want to talk about is Chreli Abano? And then – yes! Of course! It’s called context! We want to see Budapest contrasted with Reykjavik. We want to know what Helsinki is like and how Löyly stacks up against a real Finnish sauna! I’d been concerned that it would feel like filler and now I realise that without it, this book would read like a six-year-old’s account of the summer holidays: “And then we did this and then we did that and then we went there and it was really fun”. No, the baths need some context.
That’s the other trouble with this book. I genuinely don’t know if it’s going to work. My first book, A Polar Night’s Tale just fell out. It’s an adventure from Helsinki to Reykjavik via the roof of Europe, by plane, train, boat, dogsled, rail replacement bus and all the time looking for the Northern Lights. It was like that book had been inside me my whole life, just waiting to be released. My second book, Lava Land, was an easy conception but a difficult birth and just when I thought I was finished, I had to rewrite several entire chapters which turned out to be wrong. That one was a summer road trip around Iceland’s Ring Road, visiting volcanoes of all kinds and it took some internal arguing over bus vs car, tent vs campervan and then mixing half a dozen trips into one coherent narrative without breaking any timelines (the Sky Lagoon had to come out; it just didn’t make timeline sense to put it in). But both those books were simple enough. A journey. A linear narrative. One thing after another in a continuous story.
The Bath Book isn’t going to be like that. There’s no possible timeline that connects all these places as one big trip. That’s ok. How often are travelogues really one ongoing story? It’s all in how you stitch it together. And that’s one of the bits that concerns me. How do I stitch this together?? Do I stitch this together? Can it even be stitched together? Other people do this all the time but I haven’t done it before and I can’t quite figure out how.
A lot of the answers will come when I have a first draft. I had to throw out 99% of Lava Land‘s first draft but it served its purpose of showing me which parts were going in and which were never going to be mentioned again. Draft zero, someone once called it, which has stuck with me. Something you write that isn’t even worthy of being called a first draft but nonetheless, helps you shape the finished product. In this case, I’ll know whether I need another location or two, whether there’s an order they should be in and what needs to be removed and destroyed. Maybe I’ll even see a glimpse of a proper title in among the mess.
While I’m talking about my problems, let me tell you about what I do know, which is how to write a travel book.
Draft zero. Get something terrible written down. An existing thing can be edited, shuffled around or burned to the ground. Something that doesn’t exist can’t do anything.
Draft one is then a version of the final product that I can bear to look at. It’s a long way from the published book, with a lot of changes ahead but by now, I know roughly what I want it to look like by the end. Draft two will have big changes but in terms of structure, I’m probably not tearing down anything load-bearing. I will print each version, as a book. I use Lulu for this and you can get it printed as a completely separate thing from actually publishing it. I find it so much easier to have it printed in the shape of a finished book than hauling around a ream of printer paper, plus it saves me having to order new ink halfway through and having multiple fights with the printer. I take to it with a coloured pen. I can’t resist being nitpicky over SPAG at this point but what I’m really after is finding the bigger problems. I’ll have at least three versions sitting on a shelf which each contain at least one page entirely scribbled out with NO!!! written across it in huge letters. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING??, perhaps.
By the fifth or sixth version, I’m happy with the structure right down to the paragraph. Now I’m rewriting at the sentence level – something that felt ok a couple of drafts ago now feels awkwardly phrased and it’s time to sort that out. Now I’m really going for the SPAG. I’ve also probably settled on a cover by now and I’m experimenting with how it prints. The Bath Book, at this early stage, already has a provisional cover, so it’s going to skip the step of having a generic plain cover like the first few drafts usually do. Good. A Polar Night’s Tale started off as a little blue book, Lava Land as a little red book and I wasn’t seeing The Bath Book as either a green or yellow book, so I’m spared that. No doubt the current cover will vanish anyway so the tradition of early covers not matching the final cover will continue.
At last I’ll print what I call a proof copy. This is no longer merely a draft; this is the real thing, only it needs a last check. This is probably where something hideous will rear its head, that 6-12 months of editing and polishing have somehow failed to spot. The entire south coast of Iceland being geographically wrong, for example – although I spotted that in driving it, not in reading Lava Land.
And the publishing? Well, there’s a question. I self-published the first one. People at work bought it! And then not a soul ever mentioned it. Did anyone actually read it? Is it any good? No idea and no idea. So I took it off sale because ego, and I neither published nor mentioned the second book. Two people who are not me possess copies of Lava Land and neither of them have ever mentioned it, apart from “I haven’t read it yet but I will”. Fortunately, after the first week of A Polar Night’s Tale, I realised I don’t care about fame and fortune. Oh, it would be nice, but what I really want is for the books to exist, from my brain to my “my own books” shelf in my office. That is enough and it’s certainly more satisfying to possess them than to listen to the resounding silence from everyone else.
So why have I written this entire post? For accountability when I’m not even going to let you see the finished thing? Well, because I want to have written The Bath Book or whatever the title ends up being and if I’ve told my blog that it’s a work in progress, that work had better see some progress. Besides, if I can tolerate the inevitable silence, I want to put them right here for sale one day. Travel blogger and author. Buy my books – yes, actual books. Yes, books plural. Stick a link at the end of every post. Quite how that’ll work, I haven’t decided. But there will need to be an ebook version, so I’ll have to make that. No audiobook – I can’t record the whole thing properly, let alone edit it.
And also, I want your help with the title! Now you know roughly what it’s about, help me give it a better name than “The Bath Book”! Leave a comment below with your suggestion. Thank you!
I Am A Polar Bear 