World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas is a work-in-progress of creative nonfiction about my journeys in the Trans-Pecos, enriched with history and interviews.

As I proceed, I am posting many of the interviews in the "Marfa Mondays" podcast series. For people who live in Far West Texas, my using the town of Marfa as a flag for that wider region may seem a strange choice. I'll have a lot to say about it in the book.

A few other preliminary things I can say are that I'm especially interested in exploring the contrasts and comparisons with the subject of my previous travel book, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico (geography, flora and fauna, history); Marfa's (and the Trans-Pecos') iconic status in the American imagination; how the vast spaces and the quality of the light inspire various artists; and the way so many of us, all over the world, are connected on the Internet, and how this fundamentally changes a travel writer's approach to a place, and interaction with the people there.

I imagine that some or perhaps many people who live in Marfa and the region, at some point, may find this webpage via a google search or a hashtag on Twitter [@marfamondays]. So the writer's relative anonymity as he or she travels has evaporated. Similarly, far more of a writer's research, before, during and after travels, will be on-line. With Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, TripAdvisor, YouTube, webpages of all kinds, we are experiencing a hyper-accelerating social transparency—or, the sometimes very misleading appearance of transparency. I find this very interesting.

At this point it is not possible to say more for, if I've learned one thing, it is that any journey, and that includes the journey of writing a book, is strewn with surprises.

Thank you for your interest in my work. I invite you to join my mailing list for occasional updates and also, follow my Marfa Mondays podcasts on Podomatic or iTunes. You'll hear about all these if you subscribe to my blog, Madam Mayo, as well.

Update: I read from the work-in-progress, "A Visit to Swan House" and talked about some of the peculiarities of literary travel writing in the digital age in my lecture for PEN in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Listen to that as a podcast here.

Sample a few articles apropos of this work in-progress:

A Visit to Swan House
Over Burro Mesa
We Have Seen the Lights: The Marfa Ghost Lights Phenomenon
On the Trail of the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos
Blood Over Salt in Borderlands Texas: Q & A with Paul Cool about Salt Warriors
Book Review; Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire
Book Review: James McWilliams's The Pecan
Book Review: Patrick Dearen's Bitter Waters
The Sierra Madera Astrobleme (What's an Astrobleme?)