Featuring: WIP updates, a continuation of this year’s baffling vagueness, and my favourite travel stories
December Update: Stay Cozy
I’ve been deep in composing the first draft of SecretWIP. Needless to say, it’s been frantic, and I’m now halfway through, with about 40k more words to get down before I can say I’ve finished the first draft. With 30k or so written this month, I’m hoping that means I can finish it up before the end of the year, when I should be receiving a very important letter…
Where to Venture Next?
It’s January of 2016, the first flurries of a new year snow falling as I make my way from the train station of a remote Slovak town, the name of which I cannot yet pronounce. I am alone, with only a backpack to hold my scant clothes and school supplies as I try to find the dorm where I’ll be sleeping this week.
Thus began the experiences that would eventually form the start of The Venture, the first iteration of the blog you are now reading. I had just recently made one of the silliest decisions of my life. I’d dropped everything and run off to a job in Central Europe, where I would spend a year travelling throughout Slovakia and Czechia while teaching English to school children out of my backpack.
The Venture was where I documented my travels, which often took me out of my depth — from being hugged by a sweaty Slovak man to being stranded without food in a tiny town with one store, one school, and one restaurant (all closed). By spring, however, the entire journey was cut short following an outbreak of illness. I ended up journeying elsewhere, more or less settling down, and slowly, The Venture morphed into something else.
The thing is, between the stresses of life, illness, and the daily grind, I’ve found that I’ve had to channel more and more of my thirst for travelling into my fiction.
And so, after some deliberation, I’ve decided I’m going to put this Venture to better use. Some things will be changing, and some things will be staying the same. In many ways, I’ll be getting back to roots, creating the travel blog I always wanted but never managed. And I’ll be combining it with my monthly newsletter in a way that I hope you’ll find at least a little interesting.
Curious? You can get a taster for the types of things I’m going to be sharing through my newsletter come February here.
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