PROJECT UPDATES
What we've been doing, where we've been travelling to, and what's next.
We’ve just launched two new books:
1. The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments
2. The Field Guide to Deployment Planning
The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments is designed to get you to higher-risk locations and home again safely. It’s written for backpackers, business people and everyone in between. This book dives deeply into risk and personal security. I've also dedicated a chapter to information security, which is becoming more of a risk for travellers.
The Field Guide to Deployment Planning is the first in a series of Field Guides that are focused on different aspects of operating successfully in higher-risk environments. The style of the Field Guides is crisp and focused on actionable advice.
Backstory and context
Writing a book is a humbling experience. Smashing out a first draft is relatively easy. From that first draft, there’s a downward spiral of editing and second guessing that can become life-consuming. Will it ever be good enough to publish? In the end you can only hope it is.
What makes writing a book on travel security hard is the differing needs of the travelling audience. Backpackers have different travel profiles to corporate travellers, who have different profiles to NGOs operating in developing countries. There’s an urge to create a compendium that covers every use case and eventuality, when in fact what people probably need most is just a 'top 10 things to avoid' list. In The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments, I haven't covered everything but I believe I've covered the most important things, which I hope makes the book not only readable but useful.
When you’re deeply immersed in a domain it's easy to lose objectivity. It’s hard to know what aspects of domain knowledge and experience will be of interest or use to others, if any. This results in some tension between what’s left in and what’s left out. That’s why I started working on the Field Guides in parallel to The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments. I wanted to make sure there would be space for everything, eventually.
Acknowledgments
A sincere thank you to those of you who read early drafts of the The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments. The final book is quite different from those early drafts, but was shaped by your perspectives and guidance early on in the process. Thanks to Sam for your frequent reviews (sorry!), Jan from Studio D for guidance on the title and for the opportunity with OCE, Patrick and Chris from No Media for copy and line editing, and Crystal for proofreading and correcting my woeful grammar. And, of course, thanks to the many mentors I've had over the years both in the military and in the commercial world.
How to buy
Both books are currently available on the Apple Bookstore (which unfortunately isn’t available everywhere - only 51 countries right now). I’ll be exploring options to publish on Amazon and through other distribution channels later in the year.
If you do happen to purchase and read either of these books, thank you. I hope you find them useful.
The good thing about ebooks is that it’s easy to make changes and issue new versions. If any of you read the books and find any errors or inconsistencies, please let me know and I’ll add it to a backlog for the next review and release.
Please help to spread the word
If you feel so inclined, I’d appreciate you helping to get the word out to people you know that travel and might benefit from reading these books.
More to come
The pandemic isn’t quite over, and neither is my writing binge.
I have several more Field Guides in the works, with the intent to get these published in the next month or so.
I’m also in the late stages of a book on designing and delivering crisis simulation exercises, and another on evacuation planning. These books have been in the works from some years, and are considerably more involved than the Field Guides; however, I’m hoping to get at least one out before life returns to normal.
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