2019 in five: Colombia, Blood River, Doctor Dave, Valley of the Monkeys and an MA in Creative Writing
A few weeks ago, I couldn’t understand how I’d spent two years living with Sharon but we hadn’t spent a Christmas together in Northwood. Then I remembered: our first Christmas was in Colombia, on a beach.
Which was nice.
So here are five highlights of 2019. For no good reason, it skips over:
- My love-hate relationship with running. Anything over 10K is simply boring, but I did get a 23:48 Parkrun PB, finished three 10Ks and my first half-marathon.
- Ongoing adventures in baking. How does anyone stomach shop-bought bread? Will I ever make an edible soda bread?
- I lost enough weight and got fit enough to halve my high blood pressure prescription.
1 Colombia. 2019 started gently on the island paradise of Providencia in Colombia, after New Year’s celebrations were toned down when a man was — according to our hosts — “a bit shot” during Christmas Day partying. High spirits.
Providencia also put a kink in the trip for Sharon when she tumbled and twisted her knee descending from its steep 350m central peak, but after a few days gamely limping around historic Cartagena she rested in Santa Marta and sent me off with Bongo to discover the Lost City of Tayrona. We returned four days later, flushed with the success of a mountainous trek, only to find Sandy nursing Sharon through the end-stages of a less pleasant flushing: food poisoning induced by an unwashed grape.
We put the north behind us and flew south to friendly Medellin, which has replaced drug cartels with tourists, graffiti tours, cable cars and crazy taxis. There’s still extreme poverty, but the city seems determined to help the ever-expanding shanty towns become communities.
Our flight south continued too soon, to the Amazon border city of Leticia and a week of isolation in the Yoi Eco Lodge three hours upriver. Within days, we’d adapted to living with the daylight and felt wonderfully unwound as we were shown river dolphins, met some very cheeky monkeys and fished for piranhas. They’re surprisingly hard to catch for a famously hungry fish, but Sharon bagged herself a tiddler.
2 Blood River. I set a hard deadline to finish the manuscript for Blood River in the first half of 2019, and succeeded. I’d made a tough decision while in Colombia to throw out the 25,000-word final act that I’d written in late 2018, to focus on my main characters instead of introducing a new perspective that felt like a different story.
The novel more than doubled in size and took me to some very strange and dark places, but it feels like a single piece of work that takes the two key protagonists on both personal and physical journeys. It’s been in the care of three alpha readers while I began a new project in the second half of 2019, but hopefully I’ll find time to call in their comments and opinions very soon.
After that…revisions, beta readers and pitching await.
3 Doctor Dave. Sandy Camel had suffered some stitching and stuffing troubles on our travels in Bongolia, so we delivered the humpy hero into the care of Dr Dave at Alice’s Bear Shop and Hospital in Lyme Regis. Naturally, Bongo joined him for two weeks of surgery and rejuvenation in the spa town.
By the time I collected the pair, they’d marshalled the other injured bears and plushies into a new Bongolian militia. Sandy’s fur was refreshed and his foot stitching recovered, while Bongo had honed his Mongolian archery skills and decimated the local seagull population.
4 Monkey Valley. In late August, Sharon and I embarked with Bongo and Sandy on a fresh expedition, to the fabled Valley of the Monkeys, near Poitiers in France. It’s the only place in Europe where a community of bonobos lives in captivity, along with gorillas, chimps and more than 400 other primates.
Bonobos are such social apes that they have to live in communities of at least a dozen adults. They’re also a matriarchal community where troublemaking males are summarily punished by the females. and minor disagreements are resolved with a (very) quick shag instead of arguments or fighting.
Just 10km away is Cabanes de la Belle, where you can stay in an actual treehouse in a forest. So we did. It’s not quite as restful as the Amazon, but it’s a lot closer and the spiders in France are far less likely to kill you. 12/10 as they say on Buzzfeed.
5 An MA & my next novel. September was back-to-school time as I embarked on an MA course in Creative Writing: The First Novel, at St Mary’s University in Twickenham. I’m working alongside the most talented and friendly group of writers I’ve ever met. The seminars are insightful and the critiques are challenging but inspirational, demanding 3,000 well-written words for the class to dissect every four weeks.
I’m already more than 20,000 words into the new project and I can feel myself writing and planning with a very different process to Blood River. My first assessed submission of 4,000 words returned before Christmas with a positive outcome and useful feedback; another 6,000 words are due in mid-January, so it’s time to start polishing them into something shiny with a whiff of roses.
Late January seems like too long to wait before I’m back in the classroom, but we’ve set up our own critique sessions through the holiday to keep the creative stones rolling along. If only the second semester reading list was as good as the first…
