The Storied Scrolls - Mittel-Gründau
Reverse migration, dragons, & postcards
This edition of The Storied Scrolls features the return of… The Storied Scrolls!
Last newsletter I tried to ditch the name for something more serious, but I’ve missed my scroll and lived with regret all week, so I’m introducing a plot twist and bring it back.
Since last time… I published Chapter 9 of Nomad Life titled, “Mittel-Gründau,” Skutull had an epiphany about the reality of going everywhere with us, and I introduced a postcard subscription that newsletter subscribers can sign up for (see below).
Let’s break the wax seal and unroll the scroll…
Mittel-Gründau
CHAPTER 9 of Nomad Life
We called a studio apartment in Frankfurt home for our first eight days abroad. It was a corner unit on the fifth floor of a ten-story building and looked out over the winding Main River in one direction and toward downtown Frankfurt’s skyscrapers in the other. Half-a-dozen stone bridges crossed the waterway, which I'm sure is small by global standards, but is larger than any river back in Colorado.
A path ran along both banks of the river where people walked and rode bikes at all hours of the day. During evening twilight, young couples hung their feet over the retaining wall with their arms wrapped around each other. Groups of friends lounged in the grass nearby drinking beers and conversing with one another. Some people moved efficiently down the path and with a purpose, but it never felt like anybody was in a hurry, including the river. The water flowed too slowly for me to tell which direction it was moving, so I dropped a leaf in one day and watched it mosey downstream toward its junction with the Rhine and on to the North Sea…
Nomad Life
Current location: 📍Ljubljana, Slovenia
What we’ve been up to: Eating piles of pasta and pizza in the shadows of a medieval castle and stone dragons.
Miles traveled: 22,998 (0.92x 🌎)
Days nomadic: 228 (0.62x ☀️)
Words published online: 33,256
📜 Our Story | 🗺️ Map of Our Journey | 🌄 Future Itinerary
The Writer’s Journey
My Works in Progress
Chapter 10 of Nomad Life - Hallstatt, Austria
My first novel - The Great War of Inner Peace
Chapter 2 of Tales of Twilight - “Five Fingers, Four”
Inspiration & Research
✍️ Improve your writing: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee => an excellent overview of how to create compelling stories. It’s a bit formulaic for my personal taste, but I plan to apply bits of it when I get stuck.
❤️ Warm your heart: Searching for Sugar Man => a heart-warming documentary about a rock star that never was and the legend of how he killed himself on stage. If you want to watch it, don’t do research or ask questions. This is a happy story despite my description and you’ll ruin your experience if you learn too much. I rented it on Amazon.
⛰️ Learn about mountaineering: “1954 Italian Karakoram expedition to K2” => the logistics required for the first successful summit of K2 was insane—12 metric tons of equipment that required 600 porters to carry from the nearest city to basecamp. Even though K2 is the second highest mountain in the world, it is considered significantly more challenging and dangerous than Everest.
Something to Ponder
How do you balance your protagonist’s flaws and mistakes with likability?
According to Skutull
Skutull knows when Mom and Dad are about to leave him at home to “guard the house.” There are patterns in their behavior that he knows better than they do. Usually they feed him and make him potty at odd times of the day. They skip play time. They put on different clothes. They ignore him. For the first five years of Skutull’s life, all he wanted was to go with Mom and Dad everywhere they went.
His life changed for the better when he moved to Europe. Here, he’s allowed to go almost everywhere. His first few times eating out were amazing. So many interesting smells. People doted on him and scratched his head. It was everything he knew he was being left out of and more.
This week the honeymoon phase ended. Skutull now sees that the true reality of eating out with Mom and Dad—he has to lay on hard ground, smell food but never eat it, and generally be ignored for 1-2 hours. It’s still better than being left at home, but a cold reality has set in.
Quote of The Week
“We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”
-Marcus Aurelius
Enjoy the journey,
