All work and no play make Bryan a dull boy
The Golf Fanatic is Bryan Fryklund, writer, golfer, publisher, web designer, husband, jack-of-all-trades, master-of-few. Being unaccustomed to writing about himself in the third person for promotional purposes he…
…comfortably slips into the first person and I couldn’t be happier about it. I am the author of The Golf Fanatic’s Guide to Hawaii, a guide to the top golf courses in the Aloha State. No, it wasn’t torture to write, but yes, it was more work than one might think offhand. For instance, the actual “fun” of researching the courses was largely completed in the summer of 2007, while the book will finally be published in November of 2008. In between, I assure all, was plenty of blood, sweat, and tears.
Prior to living the dream life (cough) of a successful guidebook writer (cough with phlegm), I lived a quiet life in the small mountain town of Durango, Colorado, subsisting on a diet of European cheese and locally brewed beer, fly fishing local waters, habitually hot tubbing with my wife, Jen, and paying for it all with a boutique (read: solo) web design company, Divided Sky Design. Divided Sky still exists, by the way (www.dividedskydesign.com), and still is, in fact, the backbone of my family’s financial prosperity.
Well, when the town got a little too small, which seems to happen with some frequency to nomadic types, the wife and I slapped a For Rent sign on the house and packed our bags for New Orleans. We spent nearly a year in the Crescent City, and were quite happy and in no way ready to pick up stakes, when we were blown out of town by Hurricane Katrina. We were extremely lucky, in that, unlike many of our friends, all we lost were our jobs. We didn’t own our apartment, and had very little stuff. When we packed the car to evacuate before the storm hit, we had no idea that we wouldn’t be back for over a month, and that when we did return it would only be to pack up our gear and move on again.
Adventure Guide: Hawaii the Big Island
But, as the sayings go, when one door slams you make lemonade. We took this major left turn as a sign that we should make yet another wild turn, and took a job writing a guidebook to the Big Island of Hawaii. We had lived in Maui in the mid-90’s and been back to Hawaii many times (once to elope!), so we were stoked with the chance to move back, have a cool job, and get a book out of it too. The result was Adventure Guide: The Big Island of Hawaii.
When you’ve just spent your meager fortune to research a guidebook that won’t begin to pay royalties for over a year, what do you do? You double down and write another one!
It was during the depressing, post-climactic glow of being done with one book that our vision for a new, better book was hatched. We stringently researched the market and found that, unlike so many other travel niches, golf in Hawaii was wildly under represented. And the only other efforts that had been made at it were so poor, we knew that we could fill a gaping hole in the lineup of Hawaiian niche guidebooks.
The resulting effort, The Golf Fanatic’s Guide to Hawaii, was written by me, Bryan Fryklund, with original color photography by my partner, Jen Reeder, and is published by our very own publishing company, Hot Tub Publishing. The book is the first in what we hope will be a long line of Fanatic Guides (By Fanatics, For Fanatics). And it is, I have to tell you, pretty cool. But don’t take my word for it: Ernie Els, Robert Trent Jones, Jr., Rees Jones, and Tadd Fujikawa will all back up my assertions! Pick up the book and see.
Aloha, and mahalo for your time and attention!
Bryan Fryklund
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