Yurts and Horses

Song-Kul sits high enough that the seasons arrive late and leave early, and for a handful of weeks each summer the lake shore fills with yurts and horses and families who spend the rest of the year somewhere lower and warmer. I came up between projects, in the gap where one manuscript has just left and the next has not yet introduced itself.

Nothing about this trip fed a specific chapter, and I am mentioning that plainly because it would be easy to imply, on a blog like this, that every mile has a footnote. Some of them are just a week of fermented mare's milk I am still not sure I like, borrowed horses, and a silence loud enough to hear yourself think in.

I have learned to trust the weeks that do not produce material. They are usually where the next book is quietly deciding whether it wants to exist yet.