Author of Accidental Gringo
ACCIDENTAL GRINGO
How a Two-Week Vacation in Chile Blew Up My Five-Year Plan
At thirty, I had a good corporate job in Minnesota, a five-year plan, and a healthy appreciation for sensible decisions. Then I met a Chilean lawyer on a Mexican cruise. My Spanish was limited to ordering a beer and locating a bathroom.
Seven months later, I flew to Santiago for a two-week vacation. It lasted, on and off, for three years.
During that first visit, I met a French expatriate who seemed to have the life I wanted: a successful international career, fluent Spanish, and an enviable social life. I returned home with no plans to move, but when an unexpected opportunity arose, I began making decisions that would take me back to Chile.
The life I imagined proved considerably harder to achieve. I traded corporate life for a freezing boardinghouse, stumbled into an unofficial role advising Santiago's city government, watched a botched résumé translation promote me to colonel and fighter pilot, and enrolled in an MBA taught entirely in Spanish while still learning the language.
Somewhere along the way, the people I met and the experiences I stumbled into became more important than the life I'd originally set out to build.
ACCIDENTAL GRINGO is a complete 85,000-word humorous memoir about questionable decisions, cultural misunderstandings, and discovering that the life you never planned can be more interesting than the one you did.
Currently seeking literary representation.
Growing up, Tom Schlossberg was not a reader or a writer. He had a willingness to work hard—sometimes at the wrong objectives.
By high school his guidance counselor functioned less as an academic adviser than a parole officer, primarily concerned with getting him to graduation without expulsion. Afterward Tom joined the Army and began an unlikely new trajectory. He discovered that if he worked hard enough, he could occasionally accomplish things neither he nor his guidance counselor would have predicted.
He eventually graduated from the University of Minnesota and was hired as a business analyst, a job he had always assumed was reserved for smart people. Somehow he ended up in charge of an entire department of them.
Along the way Tom developed a habit of trying to prove himself. Success rarely convinced him he had gone far enough; it usually encouraged him to take on something harder and dig himself deeper than his qualifications suggested was prudent. That pattern eventually carried him to Chile, where he built an unexpected life and earned an MBA taught entirely in Spanish.
Some of the recognition that has meant the most came years later, when former employees and colleagues contacted him to say he had helped them succeed.
Tom lives in Fairfax, Virginia, and works for the U.S. Department of Justice. Accidental Gringo is his first book.
For agent or editor inquiries: tschlossberg@hotmail.com
@tomschlossberg on X