‘But you’d be committing literary suicide to move from non-fiction into fiction,’ said the wise folk of the publishing chorus.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Missy Hubris as she floated pompously on the lower reaches of the bestseller list with her latest non-fiction offering, a deep plunge right into the tits and arse of all things Bollywood and beyond. Before that it had been Kashmir and pashmina, a dose of life on an Indian newspaper, and before that Tibet.

‘But you’re creating a niche for yourself in alternative travel writing,’ chorus said.

‘Pah,’ Hubris replied. ‘I’ve been planting signposts towards fiction to the extent that several of the reviews for the most recent books billed them as novels.’ And she puffed her chest and headed off into the blue yonder to write a novel.

That was over three years ago. Not long for some writers but for someone with a book-a-year habit it seemed like a big stint between drinks at the new ISBN bar and bar code.

‘You will have to re-invent yourself,’ they had said.

‘Pants,’ Hubris had replied.

Pants it was not. You do, in almost every sense, have to start all over again. Non-fiction, especially travel writing, is a game of formula. Subject: Tall woman takes small dog up Everest with just four packets of Smarties and a length of inner tubing. Target market: all mountaineers and wannabe mountaineers, all dog owners, all Smartie lovers, all fetishists. Fiction is a game of hazard: Subject: Tricky triangular love story set in North Indian state that has been in conflict since 1989. Target market: Umm, people who might like guns and kissing.

‘And where do you find them?’ asked the marketing people.

‘Oh, I don’t know, on the rifle range at funfairs, behind the row of fluffy toy prizes,’ Missy Not-So-Hubristic-Now replied.

‘Bit risky for us,’ said most of the publishing chorus. ‘Set in Islamic state, written largely from a Kashmiri point of view, that’s fine if you’re one of them but you’re a white girl from Oxfordshire, anyway you’re a travel writer aren’t you?’

‘I know, I know, but I’ve spent all that time in Kashmir and I can wear a burqa like a good un’,’ she pleaded.

And they smiled and said ‘No thank-you,’ in various courteous ways.

That is until someone was brave enough to think that high risk was okay. And so all those stories, absorbed across 15 years in Kashmir and censored or cut along the way, finally found a home, re-stitched, rewritten and given new life.

The Wonder House is being published by Atlantic Books in August. Previous non-relevant non-fiction travelish books include: The Ochre Border – a Journey through the Tibetan Frontier Lands; Scoop-Wallah – Life on a Delhi Daily; Goat – A Story of Kashmir and Notting Hill;Bollywod Boy – Right Inside the Hindi Film Industry.

(originally published in Wexas Traveller magazine September 2005)