Late last week, I received a proof copy of my 19th book. It’s called The Completely Unreliable Travel Guide to Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. Basically, it functions as a “fictional” travel guide in that everything that I have put in the book is completely untrue. I tell the history of The Magic Kingdom knowing fully that the history that I tell is fictional. I give advice for travellers that isn’t real advice. It’s a fun book and it’s actually one of the most dense books that I’ve ever written. It’s also taken a really long time to come to fruition. Imagine if Mad Magazine created a guide to Disney World.

It all began sometime in 2015. We were in Bangladesh. I’m not sure where the idea actually started, but at some point, I got the wild notion of writing a completely fictional travel guide. I always loved the skimmable nature of travel guides. Short paragraphs. Charts. Graphs. I used to think that it would be fun to write my own travel guide, but the bad part about all of that is that I didn’t want to do all that research or go into any details. I just wanted to write whatever came to my head. But no one’s going to buy a travel guide that’s full of things the author just made up!

Or would they?

Sometime in 2015, I started writing this thing. I actually purchased a copy of another travel guide and I used that as the basis for what I was doing. Every once in a while, I would write some kind of absolute nonsense on the computer, with no rhyme or reason in regard to what I was trying to accomplish. I actually finished it, describing every single ride in the Magic Kingdom and providing a fake history of the whole thing.