When Time is Limited
“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
―Simone de Beauvoir
Traveling, the actual movement of my body and mind through space, is more time consuming than I had imagined. I don’t only lose hours with boarding airplanes or waiting for the shuttle bus (or boat—to take us along the Venetian laguna!), I also spend time in each location to get my bearings, stock basic supplies, figure out how our temporary lodgings work in the sense of garbage disposal and cooking materials and work spaces.
Our studio apartment in Venice, for example, is bit cramped for two authors to write in all day, so I dedicated yesterday’s afternoon to finding public libraries and coffee bars that could accommodate us. I roamed online and on foot, and ended up in a pasticceria that had amazing gluten-free biscottis but whose music was bad and clientèle too loud and promised WiFi nonexistent.
What I’m trying to say is: I have little time for this blog and imagine I won’t post more than a few times a month. Until I get more adept at writing on the road, at being a traveling author, I cannot afford to spend my free moments chronicling my life, no matter how much I enjoy it. The hours I sit with my laptop in relative peace and quite should be reserved for working on my novels. We’re so close to finishing a second draft of our second children’s book together and I’m almost done with a brand new novel for adults (in English!) that will take its readers to Iceland and into the near future.
I invite everyone who longs for more regular updates on our traveling life to connect with me on Instagram or Facebook, where D and I have been posting lots of pictures with short descriptions of our adventures. Whenever I’ve made some decent progress on my manuscripts, I’ll write a longer something here.
Today I leave you with the sunset that greeted us in Venice and my real smile, a proof of happiness.
