New year, new novel

I'm making a big transition in the next few days -- moving overseas for an extended stay and starting a new book. In a sense, it's a restart of this blog. I'll be back to where I was in 2007 in terms of the writing process.

I'll be living in Vietnam for about 5 1/2 months, and most of my energy for weeks has been focused on preparing for that. And I expect a lot of energy focused on getting set up there for awhile. Plus, I have several once-in-a-lifetime distractions during the stay, including some extended side trips.

But once I am settled and to the extent that I'm not socializing or traveling, I won't have a lot of responsibilities. So I plan to make it a writer's retreat. I've been stewing on this idea for my second novel since last September, sneaking in what research that I can, doing a lot of note-taking and character sketching and so on. I'm not as ready as I wanted to be, but I'm going with the flow. Sometime as soon as possible after the morning of Monday, January 4, after I finish a breakfast of cafe sua da and banh mi op la, I'm going to sit down in a quiet corner of our apartment with my notebook and start drafting the book. One way or another, with the information and skills I have. We'll see what happens. I think I'll be lucky to have it 3/4 drafted before I have to come home.

Stay tuned to see how it goes.