Joey,
I just returned from a week and a half long trip to Peru and Bolivia. Was it a transformative spiritual journey?
No. The trip was full of multiple setbacks and annoyances. There was constant gut-twisting stomach pain and diarrhea from the elevation (average was 3500 meters and I stayed as high as 3990 meters along Lake Titicaca), massive transportation delays including one that made Peruvian news, hours-long bumpy bus rides, and the worst rice in the world.
That's just a brief summary. More mishaps occurred.
However, there were also good things. I visited the legendary Machu Picchu— one of the acclaimed Seven Wonders of the World–- and it absolutely lived up to the hype. In the Bolivian desert I visited the Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni Salt Flats), a place I previously had no knowledge or care about, but came to enjoy it very much. (That's the cover picture of this email)
I also revived my Spanish, which I had not spoken regularly for half a decade, and bonded closer with my wife through the uncomfortable experience. But most of all, I got a TON of writing in.
The novel Cereus & Limnic: Escape From Okinawa, got nearly 15K new words added. And I wrote regularly by hand in a journal project I'm working on. Finally, I had time to map out and write the intro for a massive project that I will probably be working on until death: "The Lexicon."
I've been learning foreign languages since high school, and I always envisioned a project where I combined as many languages into a single grand narrative.
That project spawned during the trip and I'm already 1,000 words in.
So even though I'm exhausted from the last week and a half of a grueling travel pace, writing progress continues even stronger than before.
Now that it's February, are you working on anything new?
Let me know in a comment.
-Keith
