Writing

When I was in my twenties attending the University of Copenhagen, I sometimes tried the pick up line saying I was a writer of books. Mostly it didn't work well because the next question would be if I made any money with that and my wingman Thomas would start laughing. However, on some rare occasions, I was lucky when making a joke out of it.

Recently I saw a quote by Ernest Hemingway where he had said “In order to write about life first you must live it”. In my case, I hope that is an accurate statement, as I have only started writing about a year ago. So it is over 25 years ago I was joking about being a writer and now I am actually trying to write and I am building it on my experiences for the last 30 years. Later in 2002, in Havana drinking a mojito at a bar called Copacabana, I was talking to a black American lady who said to me; “You are just a few steps away from being Hemingway”. It was true to some extent, just without the writing. 

It would be outstanding living and writing like Hemingway staying at the Hotel Ambos Mundos in old Havana or by the sea in Cojimar where he wrote “The Old Man and the Sea” and hanging out at the now famous bars “Floridita” and “Bodeguita del Medio”. Well, I actually did something like that and I wasn’t very productive. I couldn’t imagine writing like that isolated from the rest of the world. I hear this advice that to write you should be off the internet and read many books. My writing process until now has been different as I use the internet several hours a day and it’s been my platform to write and get practice. I read a lot but mostly articles online and I listen to audiobooks and podcasts.

My stay at the hospital after a heart attack and recovery left me rethinking about my blog, newsletter and the ebook I am working on. It will now also be more about moving from the Dominican Republic back to Denmark and some implications from that around my business I had in the Dominican Republic and my new online business of content creation as a solopreneur based in Denmark. 

My ebook starts when I was in Miami visiting in March 2020 when the pandemic started, closing my office in Santo Domingo and during the pandemic moving temporarily to Las Terrenas where there is a real expat community. My blogs and newsletter could go in two directions. One being around personal development covering healthy lifestyle, travel, culture and writing about my journey improving my general physical and mental health and hoping others can find inspiration from it. The other direction being around business development covering my digital life, digital marketing, work from anywhere or in my case write from anywhere and the creator economy with the aim of making my blogs and newsletter a business and I leave open the possibility that it becomes a digital marketing for something else. 

My purpose with my writing is to be entertaining, and maybe the reader can learn something from it or be inspired. It's a long game for me. The most important thing to me is staying healthy and the first priority of my day is exercising after I have had a rich or nutritious breakfast and I take my time around my exercise. Anything else is secondary and will just go as best as it can and every day I try to write treating it more and more like a job but I reckon a new attempt at a career or a new ambitious business venture might just kill me.