Mark Baker's Blog

This is the last post on this blog. I will be focusing all of my energy on my newsletter from now on. When I started my newsletter I wasn’t sure where it was going or what to do with both a blog and a newsletter. Over the past year, though, everything has seemed to go …

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It is publication day for my 8th-century historical novel, The Wistful and the Good. The mighty are undone by pride, the bold by folly, and the good by wistfulness. Elswyth’s mother was a slave, but her father is a thegn, and Drefan, the man she is to marry, is an ealdorman’s son. But though Elswyth […]

May 19: Lake Havasu City to Hesperia: Route 66 in the West is beautiful. Route 66 in California is ugly, unrelentingly so. Or perhaps we are just tired of it all by this point.  This is not our best day. My tummy is upset and Anna is fed up with the heat. At this point […]

May 18, 2018: Peach Springs to Lake Havasu City: If there is one thing that you can say about eccentrics, whether ordinary or deliberate, they seem a happy lot. The places that are just in it for the money can sometimes seem desperately sad.  The Grand Canyon caverns motel has clearly decided that it does […]

The Interstate killed Route 66, but it also gave it life. Without the Interstate it would be an overcrowded highway. Because of it, it is a delightful tourist route. We visit the town where the new Route 66 was born. And I look upward and do not see stars.  May 17, 2018: Flagstaff to Peach […]

Seen in the right light, there is a fairytale quality to the Grand Canyon and to the forests that line the rim. But the forest path can sometimes lead to the witch’s cave — in our case, the US medical system.  May 16: Grand Canyon to Flagstaff: I am usually an early riser and when we […]

Surprise is a significant part of the pleasure of a road trip. The view revealed for a moment as you crest a rise or round a corner can be magical. But the great tourist sites of the world cannot be a surprise; one has seem them time and again long before one ever sets eyes […]

We cannot separate a people from their landscape. To visit one is to visit the other. This makes tourism a kind of natural resource that people living in attractive or unusual landscapes can choose to exploit as they would oil or timber or fertile crop land. But in the case of tourism, the choices and […]

NFTs are suddenly a topic in the discussion of arts funding. For an example, see Elle Griffin’s newsletter on the subject. There is an awful lot of bafflegab around NFT’s (Non-Fungible Tokens) and I don’t propose to unravel it for you, since that would involve the unpleasant business of working it out for myself. But […]

A friend asked me yesterday if I had thought about doing a book trailer. She even pointed me to a list of the ten most viewed book trailers of all time: https://film-14.com/the-10-most-viewe... I watched them. I don’t get it. It is not that they are not good. They are as slick as any Hollywood movie […]