Cory Hughes recently interviewed me about my book, Errant in Iberia, using questions sent in by Notes in Spanish listeners. You can check out the interview here: http://bencurtisbooktour.com/ – I think there is some good stuff in there about the experience of moving to another country, focusing of course on Spain.
Another book?
I think about writing a follow up to Errant in Iberia about once a week, but haven’t started yet for a few reasons:
1. The first book covers a period when everything was asonishingly and wonderfully new to me, when I was making a huge change to my life. That meant there was a huge amount of material to write about.
2. The story of ‘what happened next’ (i.e. what could be in book 2, continuing the story after our marriage) is very different to the ‘inspiring move abroad’ narrative that I wrote about in the first book.
What did happen next was that I struggled for a long time with finding happy employment here before we started our own business, and, once we did start the business, had a lot of hard stuff to deal with, like constant trips to the UK for a year leading up to the death of my mother. I also travelled less than in the first 3 or 4 years. This makes it a much more complicated book to write in the ‘inspiring life in Spain’ mould, though I think the rise of Notes in Spanish as a business can be an inspiring stroy (I like the thought of being inspiring, as you can tell!)
So basically, I’m not sure what the story would be for book 2. If the story of the first book, Errant in Iberia, was ‘escaping to Spain, discovering Spain and myself, meeting Marina,’ then a book 2 might be ‘finding it’s hard to really settle in, but building a cool business which solved lots of problems’, and again, I’m not sure how great a book that makes.
3. It takes a hell of a lot of effort to write a book, you have to want to do it more than anything else on the planet, and we’ve got a business to run at the moment!
4. Rather than ‘Errant 2’, I also get distracted by the idea of doing a different sort of book, based around the blog, like ‘Notes from Spain – the book’, full of the best posts on Spain from here, and new stuff with lots of fun lists, Spain-isms etc. Then I think, ‘why don’t I just blog that here instead?’
Thanks for listening! Thoughts welcome.
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 