Gravel roads, beautiful hills, almost no traffic - it was old volkswagen heaven.
Except you can't go near any of it. We drove for nearly a hundred miles through stunning scenery and saw not a fence, not a lay-by, not one foot-track - just mile after mile of barbed wire. Finally got to a place called Middlemarch and found a footpath, but couldn't take the dog on it. Maybe the Taeri council - if there is one - might like to put up a giant sign that says simply: Fuck Off. It's in the subtext anyway. If I had an ounce of her talent I'd be doing a kiwi version of Fay Godwin's Our Forbidden Land - someone needs to, before it's too late.
On a happier note, the book's been going very well. I haven't felt any of the symptoms of running out of steam: I still know where I'm going tomorrow. I'm annotating my first draft with comments in Word, highlighting all the little things I'm spotting as I'm going that I need to do better or find out: do Royal Jordanian Airways, for example, serve Alcohol? (I doubt it.) Is all their in-flight food halal? Have I shown my hero's back-story enough - shown that he's made of the right stuff? (Not yet...) As it is, I'm currently confining my research to establishing the points without which I can't move the story on. It feels like the right thing to do - to keep the flow going...
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