The Weekend I Did Not Write a Single Word
Over the weekend I was at the Slnko na skalách festival with friends. The whole thing runs on the theme of extreme hiking — talks by people who got somewhere on their own two feet, and a programme built around that. Since hiking changed my life, I could not be missing there.
I took my work along.
On Deadlines
The manuscript is supposed to be finished in mid-November. Nobody gave me that deadline, I set it myself, because without a finished manuscript nothing else can start — not the editing, not the typesetting, not the campaign. That works out to a pace of a chapter and a half a week.
The week before I wrote one. So I was already behind before I left, and I told myself I would catch up at the festival. Where is there a better place to write a book than in a forest under the rocks.
This is a delusion I believed entirely of my own free will.
On Sleeping in a Hammock
I wanted to get the full of nature, so I did not sleep in a tent. I hung a hammock between two trees, with a view straight up at the sky. I justified that with work too — that it would be inspiration for the next day of writing.
And I have to tell you, when you fall asleep in the lap of nature you hear things you never catch in a busy city. Grasshoppers. Wind in the treetops. The net rocks slowly beneath you and above you there are stars.
At three in the morning it started raining. Nothing dramatic — I quickly pulled the tarp over the hammock and slept on. I listened for a while longer to the drops landing on the tarp and the wind hitting the trees, and then I fell asleep again.
In the morning my laptop was completely dry and completely unused.
On Why I Wrote Nothing
Because I was enjoying nature, spending time with my friends and going to the programme. That is the whole explanation and I have nothing to add to it.
Part of me is annoyed and part of me is not. Writing a book about how I learned to live can get to the point where it stops you living. That weekend was exactly what the book is about — and if I had sat it out over a keyboard, it would have been a little ridiculous.
That does not change the fact that I am behind. Half a chapter, exactly. I am catching it up this week.
On the Talk That Got Me
The ones who hit me hardest were Michal Tlelka and Sofia Bočeva and their talk called 215 Days on Foot Across the Himalayas.
The Nepali Great Himalaya Trail is 1,700 kilometres long and is called the hardest trek in the world. In its whole history about a hundred people have walked it. Michal had the idea of extending it by two more countries and linking the westernmost eight-thousander, Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, through India and Nepal with the easternmost one, Kangchenjunga.
The first three hundred kilometres in Pakistan he walked alone. Then Sofia joined him and together they walked it all the way to base camp under Kangchenjunga.
From May until Christmas. More than 3,600 kilometres. 160,000 vertical metres. 62 high mountain passes, twenty of them above five thousand metres.
On Small Stories
I sat at that talk and it occurred to me what exactly I think I am playing at with my small story. They crossed the highest mountain range in the world. I lost weight and stopped using.
It held me for a while and then it came to me that I do not have to cross the Himalayas to reach somebody.
Michal and Sofia inspire me. I will never go where they went, and even so I left that evening a different person than I came.
My story will find its people in exactly the same way. There will not be as many of them and they will not be the same ones — but somewhere there is a person sitting at home between four walls telling himself that this is normal. And maybe that book will change his life the way I changed mine myself.
That is why I am writing it.
Half a chapter behind. I am catching it up this week.