Beauty from Afar

I sometimes compared writing Beauty from Afar to shooting at a moving target.  I’m proud of how it has held up for three years, but some things, of course, are not the same now as they were then.

I ruefully notice one such thing in just the three paragraphs of today’s vignette, the second segment of Chapter 1.

Didi Carr Reuben used to call her web site for Dr. Alejandro Lev, her cosmetic surgeon, terminallyvain.com … which was meant tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at her own beautiful self. It is now eternallyvain.com. Still funny, though obviously less morbid.

We also meet Dr. Fabio Zamprogno of Brazil, who we’ll find out a lot more about later in the book.

If you’re keeping track, we’re on page 25 of BFA now … the next segment will start to describe the medical tourism industry.

When it come to writing about places to which I have traveled, I have almost always chosen to write about the people I encounter and what it is like to be *me* when I travel. This is perhaps remarkably egocentric, yet I don’t see an honest way out of it. People can have wildly different experiences from a trip that is supposed to be more or less the same for anyone. I imagine that most people have very similar trips to DisneyWorld, for example. Yet my first visit there was on a belated honeymoon, nearly a quarter of a century ago; and my strongest recollection of the trip is a fabulously nonsensical fight I had with my then-wife over a game of miniature golf. This is not Disney’s fault; for all that they try to homogenize the American Vacation Experience, not everyone leaves with the intended memories.

Anyway –  I tried to make Beauty from Afar as much a book about compelling personal stories as it is a general guide to traveling overseas for cosmetic surgery, dentistry and medical care. So Chapter 1 starts out at a breakfast table at Las Cumbres Inn in Costa Rica, with patients sharing experiences, before I head in to Prisma Dental for a long second day with my mouth open.

Chapter 1 | Medical Tourism: Here, There and Everywhere

We’re up to Page 23 of the actual book, out of 220.

So the introduction to Beauty from Afar is now completely online. The concluding segment is Competition for the United States.

The intro seems short to me, maybe because I vaguely remember agonizing over writing it a few short years ago. There are only five segments; in the physical book, the introduction is only nine pages. Online, it is just five.

But it says what it needed to say. The difficulty in writing it, originally, was in deciding what to leave out; what to save for later. That was where having written a book proposal came in really handy. I trusted my outline.

Beauty from Afar was primarily aimed at readers in the United States, though I tried to make it clear that consumers of hospital care, cosmetic surgery and dental services in other countries could also learn a thing or two and might want to consider traveling for medical procedures. But by reasons of history, geography and national psychology, it seems that it is Americans who had the biggest leap of faith to make, to trust doctors in countries other than their own.

I touch on this in the brief “It’s so … Foreign” segment of the Introduction.

One more intro section to go and I can move on to Chapter 1 …

The update on the introduction today is brief, just two paragraphs. I’m not sure why they merited their own subheading when Beauty from Afar copy was being finalized. I recall being told, pretty much, that the more catchy subheads we had, the better. So that’s how we end up with A Nose Job in Iran?

And the answer to the question is: Why not?

What I was trying to point out is as true now as it was in 2005: There is terrific medical care in parts of the world that many people do not associate with terrific medical care. So while many U.S. citizens associate Iran with mullahs, election fraud and threats to world peace, we should keep in mind that Iran is a large and diverse country; that there are more than a million Americans of Iranian descent; and that if we’re worried about Iran’s nuclear technology, we can certainly assume their plastic surgeons may have mastered rhinoplasty.

In fact, they’re known for being good at it, which is why I mentioned it at all.

However briefly.

I recall that one of my favorite moments in researching Beauty from Afar came not from the travel and not from the interesting people I met along the way. It was in finding out that Michael Crichton had written about medical tourism in — of all books! — Jurassic Park.

I’m not making this up; and the information made it into the introduction as a short section, which I added today.

I’m finding that I have to edit the text of Beauty from Afar, onscreen, with an actual copy of the book on my lap. The digital version I have to work with is missing words, occasionally, and is also entirely … mispunctuated. (Is that a word?) This is because I’m working from a Quark file turned into an Acrobat file, from which I copy and paste text into a text file, and then massage it.  Copy changes and even vanishes. Note to any other authors who try this: Yes, of course you could use the final version you submitted to your publisher in MS Word, or whatever. But … are you sure that’s the final version of the book?

P.S. The physical copy of Beauty from Afar has 215 pages. When I started this project, I thought that this online version would … mimic that. It made sense to me … the book has some 65,000 words and I thought that 300 or so at a time would be about right. And given that I’d like this project to at least pay for itself, I thought that having 215 pages with advertisements was not a bad idea.

Just a few days in, though, I’ve discovered what you would have, soon enough, if I had stuck to the plan. Page breaks are artifical and annoying unless you have pages you can turn immediately. (Well, it bothers me, anyway.)  So I’m repaginating as I go. This online version of Beauty from Afar, I’m thinking, will be more like 100 pages, in the end. I intend that each page will end as unjarringly as possible. There are no “widowed” words in the book; there will be no widowed paragraphs in the online version.