Day Twenty-One

Today I wrote about one thousand words. Moving along, but could be moving faster.

Pamplona is a dreary place. In a way it feels as if I'm not away from home anymore. There is an unshakable sense of ordinariness here, and it is not to my liking. This hostel reinforces it, with its teeming body of middle-aged people. Apparently it is a popular pit stop for people walking El Camino de Santiago, a long route through the north of Spain that has been in use by pilgrims for centuries. Naturally these walkers are not pilgrims. They are dorky British tourists.

For about ten minutes I did talk to one girl from Latvia who was absolutely delightful. I told her that I was a writer, and that I studied fiction writing in school for four years, and she burst out laughing. She said, "For four years! I could teach you in ten minutes! First you sit down. Then, uh, you write. Lesson over!" 

She asked me what my book was about, and I told her, and she said, "You should make it more science fiction. Why don't you have them go to Mars, or have one of them be an alien? How about: guy goes to Mars and writes love letters to girl from Mars to Earth. Then the girl flies to Mars. Her spaceship crashes, though, and she dies, and then he kills himself. Oh, you say you are not writing science fiction?"

"I could write a book," she concluded. "I think writing a book wouldn't be very hard. You just make things up. For example, today I made a paper boat and sailed it on a pond. But the boat crashed into rocks. So now what I do is I pretend the boat was real. I say, I was on a boat. In Spain! But a great wind came, and I was wrecked on a shore, and then ... I have to work it out from there, but you see? Easy." I agreed with her on all her points.