A
Writing Break in Samaipata
You make
plan after plan, thinking all your time will be spent writing, but things get
in the way.
My
friends, Fernando and Mariela, have a beautiful little house in Samaipata,
Bolivia. Samaipata is still in the Santa
Cruz province, but a three hour drive out of the plains and into the mountains. It is a small place of just 4000 people. It looks like the old Bolivia that I knew in
the 80s. Houses are simple, in most
cases. Streets are relatively quiet (you
can walk down the middle of the street, unlike Santa Cruz where that would
get you killed). Their garden just might
be one of the ten most peaceful places on the planet!
I
planned to write a few hours each day, but things distracted me, like sleeping
late, looking for breakfast, deciding which hammock to take a nap in, and stuff
like that. I have been doing a Bible
reading for Lent, with the intent of reading the entire New Testament during
Lent. I was doing that too, but the hammock
I was reading in, hypnotized me into sleep more than once.
But that
did not mean I was not writing. I had a
stack of notes that I had made over the last few weeks and one page of notes I
made in November that I found recently. I have some completed chapters and some just
with a description of what I want to accomplish. One of my days in Samaipata I got really
energetic and put all the notes in the various chapters, even creating whole
scenes with dialogue and description. I
was having a blast getting all that recorded.
Then the
unthinkable happened. Word shut down on
me. I don’t know what happened, but one
second, I was typing and the next Word shut down. When I reopened my novel, there was nothing
on it from that day. Those notes had
added over 10 pages to my novel and they were gone. I was devastated! I was running around the house shouting, “No,
no, no!”
But I
stopped myself and reminded myself that “all things work together for the good
of them that love the Lord.” I love the
Lord. My first two novels are clean, but
could not be termed “Christian.” I am
praying and asking people to pray that this novel is accurate to the Bible, has
a message of redemption and forgiveness, and an enjoyable read too. I want to finish it in a month or so, but I
have no deadline. So why would it matter
if I lost a day.
The next
morning I woke up, bought breakfast in the market, came back to the Little
Garden of Eden, and started recording my notes again. On my second try, it was better than the day
before. Instead of adding 10 pages, I
added 12. Sometimes you just have to
trust.
Now if I
can just get out of that hammock!
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