Walking TurkeyA big thank you goes out to the new Kickstarter supporters over the past couple days for driving the campaign to 52% of its funding goal.

The Kickstarter campaign will be running until 30 September. When it closes, I will have already been walking for one month.

Most Kickstarter projects only begin after the funding window has closed. However, I’ve chosen to start the walk while the funding window is still open, because while the funding window is still open I want to show my backers, potential backers, and myself too, what a walk like this looks like in actual execution, not in theory.

In other Kickstarter-related news…

The most popular reward level so far has been the $50 one, in which at the end of the trip backers will receive two signed paperbacks, two ebooks, and the postcard.

One of the two books, the one with the working title Walking Turkey, will be a collection of anecdotes about the trip, perhaps somewhat similar to my book about moving to Istanbul in 2003, A Tight Wide-open Space.

I haven’t walked across a country before though, so I am not quite sure what this book will look like. So far I’ve read a dozen or so examples of how other writers have done it. Two of my favorites are Rory Stewart’s book about walking across Afghanistan in 2002, The Places In Between, and Patrick Leigh Fermory’s A Time of Gifts, in which he wrote about walking across Europe in the 1930s. If you have favorites of your own you’d like to suggest I take a look at, please let me know.