I started to introduce myself as a writer.
Maybe it was because I wasn’t doing much else.
I spent Spring 2019 in Seville. Stories virtually leapt out at every corner and found their way onto my laptop. It’s a pretty inspiring place, especially when most of your day is spent writing in a bullfighting themed cafe, and shooting the shit over brandy with your writing buddy (yes, everyone has a bit of a Hemingway phase).
It felt good to have some paid publications, hear my story read on a podcast, and be able to carry my book around with me to every cafe. People are reluctant to introduce themselves as a writer if they aren’t doing it full time for a plum wage.
NEWSFLASH — I don’t know a single short story writer who earns a living doing only that. Plus, now I do earn a living completely from writing, it’s not as sexy as people think. Terms like ‘content’, ‘op-eds’, and ‘thought leadership’ tend to make eyes glaze over.
You're a writer if you live it. Simple as that.
After Seville, I walked the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. Thirty days of flat landscapes, blisters, and searching for small-town supermarkets daring enough to stock items as exotic as hummus and guacamole.
You have a lot of time to think on the Camino. Walk, arrive, wash your pants, find some food, chat a bit, and wait for the next day. Almost everyone I met wrote a diary. A bit like with photos, I’ve never really been one for diaries or morning pages. I need to have the capacity to forget an image, a thought, or an idea. What tends to stick deep is the feelings, sensory data, and the sentiment that comes out between the lines of a story.
My Camino experience manifested in a novel, written in one month while I worked in a hostel in Morocco. Between serving tea, checking in guests, and cleaning toilets, I wrote 2,000 words a day. There was one point, when I realized I hadn’t left the hostel for three days or so. It was intense.
‘Network Trail’ is the story of Geoffrey Rossi, a middle-aged ex rail engineer and wannabe comedian who runs a hostel for walkers of a path running the length of Great Britain (similar to Spain’s Camino de Santiago).
Geoffrey makes a LOT of train jokes, suffers a break up and personal loss which leads him to walk the trail himself, culminating in a life-altering experience at the end of it all.
In writing the book, I learned how uncomfortable I am following the typical novel story structure.
The novel is OK. It works as a story. It delves into creativity, masculinity, and mental health. But the submission process to literary agents with names like Ridley Farquois III and Camille Winter-Smythe made me lose interest in the entire sector and lose conviction in the project. Since then, things have gotten much worse in traditional publishing, so I don’t see myself rushing back to it.
Still, I’m glad to have written a novel.
Maybe someday, I’ll finish my next one.