Well, last night after I got home from a little market-wandering a pack of monkeys jumping around on the roof failed to distract me from writing. I put some music on and kept at the writing, and made some more great progress. I also discovered that some of the content I’d produced for one character, but then discarded, was actually much more appropriate to the newest character, whose childhood and early youth, as well as his future, needed some filling-out. It’s going to be a long job of making some of that material work in its new context, and I need to sit down with a pen and paper to work out the exact timeline, because all kinds of different characters’ lives are intersecting at different points, and it’s near-future so timing is really important. But it was a nice realization.
This morning, I woke up nice and warm for the first time since coming here. But there was a pack of crazy monkeys around. They were banging on the roof, throwing stuff around up there too. They ran around the house, shook branches on all the nearby trees, and just hung around for the longest time. That distracted me some, so I took to reading some of my older stories and looking through them, seeing how so many of them seemed, in the past, as if they would fit into the novel, when now I know they absolutely won’t. (Though they’re clearly set in the same world as the novel, even that isn’t important, if I can publish them as short standalone stories.)
Then I packed the sawdust burner, locked the gadgets (the expensive things I have here) away in the closet, and walked into town. It’s a warm day, the first in a few days, and people are out and around on the streets of McLeod Ganj. I feel hungry, and I also feel like seeing a movie. And I am GOING to find a bar with people to talk with in it tonight, even if it’s only for a few hours. Because let me tell you, staying in a little house in the middle of nowhere, with nobody to talk to, gets to your head. Especially when all the books laying around are Buddhist texts, with the exception of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and a book of short stories by Ruskin Bond (The Night Train at Deoli, I think it’s called) with a ghost story so disturbing I stopped reading the book after I finished it. That’s okay, I have V.S. Naipaul and Cervantes to keep me company.
Oh, yeah. I’ve discovered that the novel Don Quixote is freakin’ hilarious. Call me a late bloomer.
One last note: I still have no idea whether I have the right phone number or not. I haven’t received any calls, anyway. I’m waiting till next week before I make any more calls either to Korea or Canada, though.
Right, I should get out of here. This is holiday and I am wasting it typing typing typing.
Ooops. But before I do go: Ritu has posted a hilarious description of some movies I watched with her before leaving for Dharamsala. I’m gonna make EVERYONE watch Koi Mil Gaya when I get back to Korea. Muhahahaha.