An Annotated History of Innkeeping in the 21st Century

What began out of frustration for my attempts to find a publisher for my memoir The Innkeeper's Husband has turned into a full-scale rewrite of the book. With it comes a new title: An Annotated History of Innkeeping in the 21st Century.

Several weeks ago Chris Millis and I were talking about novel-writing techniques, and we discussed the idea of annotating a novel, a la David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest. As I was contemplating the fate of The Innkeeper's Husband, I started to think about this method as a way of injecting something more textual into the book, something that would divorce it from a strict narrative. Though the original draft contained articles from a regular column on innkeeping that I'd written several years ago as chapter bridges, those columns felt like asynchronous intrusions.

So, on a whim, and while I'm getting close to the end of another novel I'm working on, I dropped what I was doing and reworked The Innkeeper's Husband into An Annotated History of Innkeeping in the 21st Century.

What's more, I decided to serialize the rewrite as I complete each chapter so that everyone out there in pajama land can enjoy or be aggravated by my efforts. Totally up to you.

Here is the Introduction and Chapter 1. And please remember, this is the Beta version. (That's the inchoate version, for you smarty pants.)