What's going on with my volume 2?

For a year now I have been receiving questions about the written release date of my next adventures. Here's what's going on!

First a little summary. I cycled from England to Malaysia from March 2016 to May 2017 (27 countries and 18,000 km). I stopped for a year working as a lawyer in Kuala Lumpur for a French company. At the same time, I put on paper these 14 months "ofHistoires à dormir dehors Which were published in the spring of 2018.

In July 2018, I hit the road again in Asia at the same place where I had stopped. From Kuala Lumpur, I reached Singapore, then on the other side of a cargo ride, I went from Taiwan to Japan, via China and South Korea. Then came two years of peregrinations in South America, from Tierra del Fuego to Peru.

Mid-March, like almost all travelers in the world, I came back to the country. I didn't really have a career plan at the time and the return had been too hasty for me to have time to think about it.

A photo that I could see as the cover of volume 2.

The good thing is that I had accumulated no less than 20 km and a bunch of new adventures since my first book. I immediately got down to writing but I don't think I had enough perspective yet. My writings were too long, too heavy and too detailed.

Then the contracts began to arrive. I wrote for others. In particular, I have collaborated on no less than five Ulysses guides (see which ones here). I got ahead by writing all my articles for the year for the different editions of the Vélo Mag.

I did storytelling, a few websites, virtual conferences.

And especially video. People from Vélo Québec asked me to go meet the good people of Quebec by traveling a few kilometers of the 5 that make up the beautiful Route verte. You will already find gathered here the first four episodes of this web series. Last winter I also filmed and edited a fatbike video, and this summer I'm continuing my adventures across Quebec to continue the webseries.

Finally, I regularly shoot corporate videos which without necessarily being linked to the outdoors always make me learn new subjects.

"Come to the point! "

In short, for me this pandemic has been busier than ever. I always had 3, 4 or 8 projects that kept me from getting my own chapters. Above all, writing the first volume of my journey has been the most complex and difficult achievement of my life. Writing such a book means asking yourself a variety of questions in each sentence:

• What goes beyond just a pleasant memory for me and becomes interesting for the reader?

• How to gather in a coherent chapter (intro, development, punchy end) all the mini anecdotes of a duration of time? Some stories deal with a few hours (a passage through customs for example), others can extend over two or three weeks (like crossing a desert).

• Does what I have been told about the history of a region hold true? I read a lot about each statement so as not to write falsehoods.

• Is my chapter too long? Answer: yes. The 4th or 5th version will become readable.

• Does my sentence adequately transcribe the colors or smells of the landscapes, and what I was feeling at the time?

I'm not even talking about choosing THE right photo to accompany a chapter.

I also need a good hour of thinking before I even start writing. And once concentrated, a first draft of a chapter takes me at least three to four hours. With all of my other projects, I find it difficult to focus all of my attention on my writing for several consecutive hours.

So what's going on?

All this to say that I am about a little less than a third of it. Writing chronologically, I am soon arriving in South America. I hope that unlike my pedal strokes there, I will have a backwash for writing!