Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 5, May 2004

Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

Local author to print new book 'on demand'

By JAMES BUSH

Dave Fox's life changed at the dinner table.

The Greenwood resident, who leads tours of Scandinavia for European travel guru Rick Steves and is completing a volume of his own humorous travel experiences, remembers well his father's announcement that the family would spend the next year living in England.

"My parents let me choose between going to a local school and going to an American school," recalls Fox, who was just eight years old at the time.

His status as the "American kid" gave him a bit of celebrity among his classmates and the longer English school year with its many short breaks gave the family time for side trips to Greece, Tunisia, and Switzerland. The year abroad did have one undesirable effect: "I came back with a full British accent," he says. It disappeared after about a month, "because I was ruthlessly teased by my American friends."

While the accent went away, Fox's fascination with travel and foreign cultures has never waned. "Getting Lost: Mishaps of an Accidental Nomad," his first book of humorous travel experiences is set to be released early next year by print-on-demand publisher AuthorHouse. He won this opportunity through a book proposal competition at the University of Dayton's Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop.

Fox says the print-on-demand field, in which books can be produced one at a time to fill orders, offers great opportunities for first-time authors. Fox is no stranger to unusual literary formats: the former Wisconsin Public Radio announcer has also self-released an audio CD of some of his favorite humor pieces entitled "The Fox that Quacked."

After almost a decade working for Steves, both as a travel guide and as editor of the Edmonds travel guru's Web site, Fox decided he needed to scale back his job to concentrate on his freelance humor and travel writing. "I would come home at night and my brain would be too tired to work on my own writing," he says.

While he's still leading Scandinavian tour groups twice a year and making speaking appearances for Steves, Fox has also added work as a writing teacher to his resume. He teaches courses in humor writing and travel journal writing for the Portland Community College system and Discover U. Fox says he picked up the humor writing class from Bill Stainton (best known as a writer and performer on the former local sketch-comedy television show "Almost Live") and began studying humor. "I took a really methodical, geeky approach to it all," he says. "I'm constantly making mental notes as to why [things are funny]."

Writing better travel journals is mainly a matter of getting your emotions onto the page and realizing that your initial notes are a first draft, not a finished product, he says. "People write a bad first draft and they say 'This is bad' and then never finish what they started," he says.

Fox first gained a fascination with Scandinavian cultures and languages from his second European experience, the year he spent in Norway as an exchange student before college. He chose to attend the University of Wisconsin in part because the school had both a good journalism school and a top program in Scandinavian studies. Perhaps his most important college experience was a three-month, low-budget trip through Europe which took him from the northern tip of Norway to southern Turkey. Ironically, he wrote a book's worth of unpublished travel journals after that trip, some of which will be reworked in "Getting Lost."

Fox looks at his upcoming print-on-demand book as a opportunity to get his work into the marketplace, with an eye toward possibly seeing the book picked up later by a major publisher. It's certainly a possibility: his long-time boss Rick Steves originally self-published "Europe Through the Back Door," the best-selling book which spawned his successful travel business.

Veteran Web master Fox is also reaching out to potential readers through his own Web site (www.davethefox.com), which recently hosted a 24-hour marathon trivia contest with the top prize of "a million dollars and an omelet." Well, the "million dollars" translates to a handful of lottery tickets, but the omelet is actually quite tasty (provided courtesy of Greenwood's Pig & Whistle eatery).

Fox credits the Internet with helping self-published and first-time authors by providing a potential worldwide audience. "If there are people out there looking for what you're writing about," he says, "they'll find you."