Going to England Soon

It is Saturday morning.  I am back at home in the Balkans.  Sadly, within a few days of returning home, we received a phone call from England.  I've been asked to fly to Cornwall to tutor a child.  On the bright side, the living conditions should be good.  I will be in a castle.  There are beautiful hikes, cliffs, and waves.  It has been agreed that their chefs can cater to my diet.  The castle currently serves as a hotel and restaurant.  I do not expect similar conditions to what I had in Ireland.

On the less bright side, I had really been looking forward to a few weeks back at home.  I had been looking forward to the nutrient-dense food of this part of the world, to having and using my own kitchen, to long walks, to long hours in the early mornings alone with my laptop and a heater at my feet, to catching up on the various financial tasks that pop up and accumulate and need to addressed every few months or so (especially during tax season), and most of all, to spending lots of time reading and writing (or, at least, "practicing" writing.)

It has been years since I felt I could comfortably set aside time in my days to pursue what I could consider "passions..." that is, things I do because I love to do them, not because I feel I must do them or because I consider that I should love to do them.  It has been years since I really felt I could comfortably set aside time to write.

I have been listening to the audiobook of On Writing by Steven King.  He says that if one wants to become a good writer, one must read a lot, and write a lot, and that there is no way around that.  Since the new year, therefore, along with all its resolutions, I have made an effort to read every day.  I read about writing, and I read fiction.

It is a funny thing: pushing myself back into reading fiction regularly after all these years and decades of bouncing around handling this and that as the age of the internet barrels forward.  How much time that was once spent reading fiction is now spent on online shopping, browsing, researching random things one happens to be curious about, and last but not least, social media?

It is not that I did not read fiction.  I did.  But more often, it was in the form of listening to audiobooks at night, to fall asleep.  At some times, I listened to the same books over and over, if that was what helped me sleep.  At other times, I made my way through anything from classics to Agatha Christie to the latest Audible Original.  I have books on Kindle (the kind one reads with one's eyes) that I would read from time to time, but much more sporadically.  And, admittedly, many of these books have gone unfinished and await my return to this day.

I have noticed now that I tend to jump from book to book, reading a bit of one, till I feel like reading a bit of the other, and bouncing around between up to 9 or 10 books at a time.  This goes for fiction and nonfiction.  I do eventually finish many of these books.  But it is so unlike the old days, when I slept with a single book at my bedside table, or read one Louis L'Amour book at a time, cover to cover, before moving on to the next.

When I was a teenager, in the years before the knowledge or use of the internet was widespread, I used to typically read one book at a time. I still recall the night I stayed up till 5 am reading Watership Down in my boarding school dorm room, feeling very secretive and naughty about how delinquent I had been.  I remember reading "Children of the Arbat," cover to cover in Prague.  I remember buying old classics, in English, which were sold on the sidewalk in the Forbidden City in Beijing, and later trying to read Moby Dick while traveling through China by train, only to find out [utterly] boring it can be to read about little action on wide open seas, while experiencing little action on a train through wide open deserts.  Unfortunately I abandoned that book.  In Northern Pakistan, I recall finding a library (connected to the Agha Khan Research Foundation if I remember correctly), and reading Under a Sickle Moon by Peregrine Hodson.  I remember when I was a teenager, that the home in which I was a frequent guest whenever I used to hitchhike through Switzerland, had a book called Fit for Life lying around.  I promptly read it (probably the whole thing except for all the recipes), and it changed my viewpoint on diet and nutrition profoundly for the worse for many years (this is not a book or diet I would recommend to anyone and it is full of false and misleading information, but not to digress ...)

And now, before proceeding much further with this post, I want to acknowledge to you (my non-existent, imaginary, or future reader), that I am fully aware that I have not posted on this blog for several days, and that I am actually justified in this.  You see, I have been reading a book, called 5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter , by Chris Fox.  And in this book, toward the beginning (where I am at in the book), he describes what he calls "Writing Sprints."  These writing sprints begin at 5 minutes each.  They are done daily.  They are done to get a person writing, to improve his writing, and to increase one’s speed of good quality writing.  He explains this more thoroughly in the book.

I can hereby confirm that on every day in which I did not post in this blog, with the exception of a travel day (an overnight in Turkey), I have at the minimum done one writing sprint.  Therefore I consider that I am remaining consistent with my determination to write every day, whenever possible (travel days don’t have to count as far as I’m concerned).

As sometimes happens when one writes a blog post, I started this post on Saturday and am now finishing it on Monday.  There will be more to write, but that will be on another day.