An old Roman road

Obviously I couldn’t take my treadmill with me on the flight yesterday, especially since I was limited to a less than generous fifteen kilos in my suitcase, so I’ve had to try running in the real world. That turned out to be harder than I expected: this town is so hilly it makes San Francisco look like Amsterdam. Running downhill is problematic because it’s so steep that there’s a good chance of falling over, and running uphill is just plain bonkers. But I gave it a go, nevertheless, and made it as far as the café where I had earlier breakfasted by the beach and then back again, totalling about 2.6 miles, most of which was vertical.

The edits to my novel flowed well with the assistance of some delicious rosé wine which cost me only two Euros for a bottle. It even had a real cork, which is a rare treat with bargain basement booze these days. I addressed the issue of adding depth to some scenes where Ruby is escaping from her captors in southern France which was just a fast-moving sequence of events in the first draft that had only a loose affiliation to the concept of ‘literature’. I wanted to get into the character’s head without slowing down the pace too much, and I think I’ve found a way to make it work. She finds a path in the woods and realises that it’s an old Roman road, and the archaeologist part of her mind starts to analyse its origins and significance. This makes her long to become again the person that she was meant to be, not the person that she has been forced to be.

The problem I’m having with writing here is that it’s not so easy to dip in and out of the Internet to research the background to things like this Roman road. The connection speed is too slow to be useful. In fact, it’s just like the old days when dialing up was a hit-and-miss affair, and even when you got through you could go and make a cup of tea whilst waiting for the first page to appear. In fact you could probably grow the tea leaves as well. But I have a back-up plan which I might instigate tomorrow. I need to learn to read and write Mayan glyphs, and I have a book with me that can teach me the grammar and styles of their carvings. If I can master this I’ll be able to create an original design for a carved stele which will feed vital clues to the characters in the novel, and even though it probably won’t be printed in the novel it might be useful for the back cover design or for an accompanying website with all the bonus features that I can add to it.

So as if learning Brazilian Portuguese wasn’t hard enough, whilst trying to recall the Spanish I learned a quarter of a century ago so that I can order eggs on toast in the local café, I’m now going to try to learn a language that’s been lost in the jungle for thousands of years and I won’t have any local waiters on which to test my skills. Er, piece of cake.