Rodney Dodig

The chill of fall is in the air. The clouds that cover Lima in the winter are making their appearance more often. Still, the sun continues to fight the battle and most days here in San Borja are beautiful. The sun god dominates but his travels to the northern hemisphere take him farther away from those of us south of the equatorial line. I have friends here who worship the sun and heat, wishing that it would stay year round. I don’t join them in their dances of joy. I appreciate the cool embrace of old man winter with his beard of mist and clouds. The mystery created by the wet fog called garua here in Peru begs for stories to be written. What strange man or woman will walk out of that grey background and whisper in my ear. Tell me a tale of murder so foul that it beggars belief before they disappear like a magician’s assistant. They leave me sitting there wondering if it was real or a figment of my overactive imagination. Yes, I long for the touch of his ice cold fingers on my cheek. Old man winter, come embrace me.

I’ve managed to send off a few more queries this past week. Unfortunately, it was only a few. I’ve also started work on book two again. I’ve decided to change the storyline in the book and make it more about cops being murdered and less about a big drug bust. As a result, the first new chapter I wrote this week was a construction crew finding two more bodies at their site. One dip of the gigantic metal claw into the earth and it came up with an arm dangling from its iron talon. Rodriguez will be called back from his exile in the jungles to work on these murders. I’m excited to be working on this book again. I can’t tell you how much I loathe editing and the business end of writing. I realize it has to be done though.

The writers’ group met this past week. Kathy submitted the beginning to a short story or a novel. She hasn’t decided yet. It was very good for a beginning writer and I particularly loved the dialog. She needed a few more adjectives to help flesh out some locations and some work to make her main character a little clearer. I hope that she continues to work on the piece and make something out of it. I’m not sure if we’ll meet this week, it seems that we are a busy bunch and writing pieces for critique has dropped to the bottom of most of our lists. Victoria is working on her poetry and song writing. Amanda is doing research for her third book. Katrina has guests and teaches full time and you all know what my schedule is like.

I had my usual meetings with friends this past week for coffee, lunch or breakfast. On Friday morning, Larry joined me at the Patio where we discussed progress on our writing projects. Larry is building a website so that takes up a lot of his time. It has to do with business English for non-English speaking businessmen. He’s been getting a lot of good feedback on the project so far. Keeping house staff seems to be an ongoing problem for his family. I don’t envy them that. Afterwards, I met with Kathy for lunch and we talked about the critique she received the day before. From there I wandered over to “Oh Jess’s” new cupcake store. It just opened this past week and she makes the most delicious cupcakes. The address is Calle Berlin 581, Miraflores in case you want to stop by and enjoy one of her delicious creations. Here is the link to her FB page https://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100003585168607 in case you are interested. Saturday I met Tim and Lourdes for breakfast at Sandwich.com. Tim’s friend Keith joined us also. Afterwards we stopped and bought Tinka Tickets (Peruvian Lottery), unfortunately I didn’t win. Tim will be leaving for Canada around June 11^th and Lourdes will find out this week if her visa is approved so she can visit him and his family while he is home.

Sunday was Mother’s Day and I spent the morning thinking about my wonderful mother. In the afternoon, I enjoyed a late lunch with Steve and his Mom, Jaita at a restaurant in Lince. It was a nice time spent with friends and my Peruvian family. I hope all of you were able to share the day and make it special for someone. Have a great week everyone. I’m off to Nasca on Friday. Look for updates after I return.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 8:56 am and is filed under Living in Lima, Peru. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.