I've been asked a few times - and all I can answer is, please be patient. I've been back a couple of weeks, and begun the process of transcribing my scribbled notes onto the computer - which sounds mind-numblingly dull, but it enables me to highlight the relevant bits and to recall little gems I might otherwise have forgotten. And delete the drivel, of course, and there's plenty of that.
Once that is done, I need to spend time thinking.
Sometimes thinking can be mistaken for faffing.
I discovered, on one trip some years ago, that not everyone understands the verb 'to faff'. It's more than procrastinating, for that can sometimes be fruitful - the kitchen floor might get cleaned, for instance, when you really ought to be writing that synopsis. Faffing is far less directed, or constructive; it is an apparently aimless mooching about which, to the casual observer, might be mistaken for wasted time. I would argue that is can be highly productive, for it is in the faffing time that ideas are allowed out to play - and if we let them be they can realign themselves without any apparent intervention for the player. We can emerge from that faffing time with a story we hadn't seen before.
Okay, I'll dignify it with the name of 'thinking.' For me, it is an essential part of the process of finding the thread to hold any travel narrative together. I can easily offer you a succession of anecdotes; but I want to do more than that - to find the idea, the story than holds it all together. Only once I know that I have a coherent story can I tell you if there will be another ebook.
But, for those of you for whom this is not enough, here is another picture. It is a handbasin, in a the loo in a little restaurant in Havana. There was no water in the tap, so it was not fit for purpose. So it doesn't matter that there's no plug. But hey ho, who needs water when you've a basin like this?
