That's Infotainment!

I laughingly call my novel 'infotainment,' I think.  That’s its sub-level category. According to Wikipedia, infotainment is information-based media content or programming that also includes entertainment content. It's done in an effort to enhance popularity with audiences and consumers.  I guess that’s what I’m shooting for, a combination of the two (doubling the pleasure?). I tried to cram plenty of factual events in my novel, spanning the world of politics, communication, geography, education, sports, music, the atmosphere of the 1970’s, and so on. The lives of the main characters and the people they meet are largely as you read about them. In that way, it’s journalism. It's a blog, a diary, a true-to-life rendition of the facts. But it’s also entertainment. It has to grab attention, and therefore be embellished in certain spots. I tried to include as much “color” in the events and characters as possible. I tried to make Roger and Otto’s lives “stranger than fiction”—even when it turned reality on its ear. Meeting Joe Namath in a laundromat (page 271-272)? Nah, never happened. But the story seemed to call for it at that spot. The spiteful cowboy getting his foot caught in an animal trap (page 108-109)? It’s all true except for that animal trap . . . the whole “get out of town by sunrise” story needed a mini-climax, so I gave it one. Hanging overnight on a boat in a marina (Day 18)? That happened to me, but not on this trip, and not with Otto.  My sister and I had two friends named Harry and Mary who lived on a boat on the Jersey Shore about 20 years after I took the trip. That story comes from there.