I am in the enviable position of having more than one career. I work in general practice three days of the week – although often more. Here I am described as a "part-time woman", implying perhaps that I am also sometimes a part-time man. Not going in to the surgery every day mostly keeps me fresh and enthusiastic and often there is space and energy for other projects too. Many of these are to do with writing.
Yesterday evening, for example, I looked over a scientific submission on travel health for the medical journal International Health. Such original research is interesting and highlights different approaches to keeping people healthy. I also beaver away at my regular contributions for Wanderlust magazine. It is pleasing to report that in the current (March) issue I’ve worked on some notes on mountain health with my son, Alex. It is fun to be published in the same issue of the magazine.
Wanderlust comes out eight times a year so I often seem to have some feature or other mulling in my head, but there are longer term projects.
Quite while back the lovely editorial team at Bradt Travel Guides asked me – and my co-author Matthew Ellis – to update our book Your Child Abroad: a travel health guide. We did that and it all went quiet for ages. Then unexpectedly – as happens in publishing – the editors and designers have taken it up again and are working on the new edition. This will be in electronic format, and available – soon we hope – via http://www.bradtguides.com/
Coincidentally I received yesterday a contributor copy of Hilary Bradt’s Trekking in Peru. It plopped unexpectedly through my letter box. This was my prize for work done last year, updating the health chapter for this compact 40^th anniversary edition. I believe I wrote the original health chapter for the Peru & Bolivia guide and for several of the earlier editions (but no, I haven’t been writing on travel health for 40 years!).
I eagerly await the next post – I’m expecting a first consignment of printed books of Snowfed Waters. Meanwhile, this morning, I discovered that a piece I wrote called Power to Heal has been accepted for publication in the beautiful on-line journal of Poetry Prose & Images called When Women Waken. I’ll post the text here later, but obviously not before it is launched on WWW in the Spring issue (March 2014).
Sometimes, then, I can feel as if I’m always tapping away at my desk, with very little to show for my effort. Then some weeks it feels like there’s a veritable avalanche of products of my batherings.
Ah but now I must prepare myself.... I am to spend the afternoon with some fresh-faced first year medical students, who are learning to talk to patients. Life is nothing if not full.