Book progress journal

Day nine, "Tropic (of) Thunder"

Day nine of final book edits. Big storm blew in this morning and I spent most of the day indoors working on the book. I say “indoors” but here on the island most doors and nearly all windows are kept open at all hours of the day and night. The thought of this place with closed windows and doors feels alien, to say the least. (Maybe a thing closer to wholesale blasphemy or extreme heretical nonsense.) No, to be proper you keep the house open, and the wind blows in and when it storms the rain comes in too and so does the sea air and the smell of the jungle.

Everyone but me left the house early while I stayed home working on the second to last chapter. The storm raged through the afternoon and the rain drummed on the roof and thunder cracked and rolled, deep and low and gutteral.

I sat in various rooms of the house with the manuscript and my copy of Durrell’s Bitter Lemons and a glass of mate’, and worked while it rained so hard you couldn’t see the waters of the harbor, just a silvery veil of rain falling and cloudy mist hanging over the mountains behind us.

Once it let up everyone came home and we took Oscar’s trustworthy, ever-ready taxi down the mountain, spent some time in town, then back up the mountain for food and a cocktail I invented called “Tropic (of) Thunder.” The good Nathaniel Kennon Perkins and I stayed up later than everyone, listening to cumbia and enjoying various incarnations of Tropic (of) Thunder.”

It’s a secret recipe and I’ll never give up the goods. Unless of course we meet at a crossroads at midnight on a hot, wet April night in coastal South America. Or not. Contact me privately by secondhand courier (using the correct code, or be damned) and we will work out the transaction in a rum-soaked parley. As they say here, “Dues escreve certo por linhas tortas” or “Things will work out, even if the process seems chaotic.” Okay. Yes. Goodnight.