Wow. I’ve been on the road for a very long time. At this point, sitting in a little cafe in Hanoi, it’s been about eight months since Laura and I took off out of New York in September. I’ve spent most of my writing time working on new fiction, or packaging up old fiction into a little collection of short stories that you should definitely buy. I’m also jump-up-and-down excited about the novel I started working on in Buenos Aires and am about halfway through a first draft. In addition, I’ve written six short stories in that time, many of which are bouncing around the rejectosphere of literary magazines whose attention I pretend not to crave.

That sure seems productive, right? Ha. Ha. Ha. Sigh. Counting December, it’s taken six and a half months to produce an unfinished manuscript and several shorts, maybe sixty thousand words in all. If I could have managed even a very un Stephen King like output of five hundred words per day, I’d have written nearly a hundred thousand words by now.

Instead, I spent six weeks working full time freelance to refill travel coffers. Once those were full, our lovely lull in Thailand was at an end and it was time to get back on the road again. Laura and I spent two months moving every two to four days through the Indian subcontinent. It was a grueling pace, through a challenging country, not to mention that at one point I ended up bedridden for a week with a belly full of e. coli. So yeah, output suffered.

I did get a lot of something else, though. Experience. Sights, sounds, smells (probably too many smells). India is a vast, strange, and often horrible place that is impossible to visit without being affected. Experience is different than inspiration, it’s not a crutch to lean on and wait for, it is the raw material that a writer synthesizes into a story.

We are going to land in Chiang Mai soon. I will likely have another freelance contract, but in the meantime I will also have opportunity to write full time again. I’m excited about the next two to three months. And hey, if you join my newsletter you might even get a sneak peek at some of those short stories, since I won’t be publishing much (if any) new work on my blog. If you’re interested in that novel that I’ve been working on, you are welcome to read a sample chapter. It’s an adventure story, which is fitting.