The Walk

This week I finally began preparing the rewrite of my novel. Over the past year I’ve recorded hundreds of voice notes whenever an idea appeared, while walking through the woods, riding my bike or making dinner. Most of them last less than a minute. A better ending to a scene. A new character. A monastery that suddenly belongs on a cliff instead of in a valley. My plan was simply to transcribe them, organise them into a story bible and finally start writing. Instead, I spent an afternoon listening to my own thoughts, and as the notes piled up on my screen, I realised they weren’t really about medieval Ireland or even the mechanics of the magic system. Almost every idea circled back to the same question: what does creativity actually do?
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That question led me to the medieval monks who inspired much of my story. They weren’t merely copying manuscripts. Through words, images and craftsmanship they shaped the imagination of the people around them. It reminded me of Tolkien’s description of artists as sub-creators. God alone creates from nothing. We receive creation as a gift and, through imagination and skill, participate in it. Suddenly I understood that this had become the foundation of my novel. The magic isn’t really about extraordinary powers. It’s about the mysterious way stories, beauty and imagination can change people and, through them, the world.
Perhaps that’s also why rewriting this book has become so important to me. For months I’d measured my progress in chapters, deadlines and word counts. Sitting there with those voice notes, I realised I’d been measuring the wrong thing. The novel isn’t only teaching me how to tell a better story. It’s teaching me how to become a better storyteller. Every rewrite, every conversation with another author, every sketch in my notebook and every documentary I make is part of that same apprenticeship. I still hope that one day I’ll hold this novel in my hands. But when that day comes, I suspect the greatest gift won’t be the finished book. It will be the journey of becoming the person who was able to write it.
Fr. Roderick Vonhögen
P.S.: This article is based on the latest episode of my podcast The Walk. If you’d rather hear the story in my own voice, you’ll find the podcast player at the top of this page.
News updates:
I’ve started painting again for the first time in more than thirty years. Inspired by medieval manuscripts, I’m creating a small bestiary of strange and mythical creatures in watercolor. It’s still very much an experiment, but several of the illustrations have already sparked ideas for new stories.
My new Dutch fantasy podcast, Fantasyfans, is also beginning to find its audience. This weekend I recorded a series of interviews at a small outdoor fantasy and board game fair. One of my favorite parts of these events is discovering how generous creative people are when they start talking about their work. Every conversation leaves me with fresh ideas and renewed enthusiasm for my own writing.
That theme continued in another way this week, when I joined fantasy author Sandy Butchers on her podcast for a conversation about creativity, geek culture and why we tell stories in the first place. It was a joy to switch from interviewer to guest for a change. If you’d like to listen, you can find the episode here:



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When a partial solar eclipse became visible across Europe this week, I grabbed the most sophisticated piece of scientific equipment I own.
A kitchen colander.
I’d read that the tiny holes work like a pinhole camera, projecting dozens of miniature eclipses onto a sheet of white paper. It sounded just improbable enough to be worth trying. So I packed the colander in my backpack, walked to the open fields outside my village, and joined hundreds of other people who had gathered to watch the sky.
Some had brought telescopes. Others carried homemade viewing boxes or expensive camera gear. A few generous souls let curious strangers peer through their eclipse glasses. Children pointed excitedly at the strange crescent-shaped shadows beneath the trees, while amateur photographers compared lenses and filters.
For a brief moment, complete strangers became companions, united by the simple fact that something remarkable was happening overhead.
My humble colander turned out to work perfectly.
More Than an Eclipse
The last time I witnessed a solar eclipse was more than twenty-five years ago.
As I stood there watching the Moon slowly uncover the Sun again, I realised how much life had happened between those two afternoons.
Back then I had only recently been ordained. Podcasting barely existed. Smartphones belonged to science fiction. I hadn’t studied in Rome yet. I hadn’t experienced burnout. I hadn’t spent years making television documentaries, walked the Camino de Santiago or started writing novels.
Standing in that same sunlight, I wasn’t just watching an eclipse. I was looking across almost three decades of my own life.
It’s strange how time works.
Twenty-five years ago feels almost like yesterday. Yet when I imagine another twenty-five years stretching ahead, it suddenly seems like an impossibly long road. Our memories compress time. The future, meanwhile, always feels endless, until one day you realise it isn’t.
What Actually Lasts
That thought lingered with me as I walked home.
People often worry about the legacy they’ll leave behind. Buildings. Careers. Collections. Recognition.
History suggests those things don’t last very long.
One of the advantages of having studied in Rome is that you spend your days surrounded by the remains of people who once believed their empires would last forever. Today, even the mightiest monuments are incomplete. Stones have been reused. Statues have crumbled. Names have faded.
Perhaps that’s why I don’t find much comfort in the idea of leaving something behind.
What matters far more to me are the moments that quietly shape a life. An afternoon spent filming a documentary. A conversation with a stranger. A walk through the woods. Or standing in a field with hundreds of people, all looking up at the same sky.
Those are the moments that stay with us long after the photographs have disappeared into forgotten hard drives.
As the sunlight slowly returned to normal, everyone packed away their cameras, folded up their picnic chairs and cycled home.
I put the colander back in my backpack.
I won’t need it to watch solar eclipses anymore. The next deep partial eclipse in my country will be in 2081.
But I’ll keep it anyway.
Maybe not for the next eclipse.
Just for draining my pasta.
This article is based on the latest episode of my podcast The Walk. If you’d rather hear the story in my own voice, you’ll find the podcast player at the top of this page.


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On Sunday afternoon at the Castlefest fantasy festival, I made a last-minute decision.
I’d already spent the previous day interviewing authors for my new Dutch podcast, Fantasyfans.nl. Instead of recording more conversations, I decided to spend the rest of the festival making a short documentary.
There was no camera crew, no script and no elaborate equipment. Just my iPhone and a rough idea of the story I wanted to tell. I wandered through the castle grounds, talking to visitors about the stories behind their costumes, interviewing artists and following whatever caught my attention.
By the time I boarded the train home, I couldn’t stop smiling.
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An Old Craft
It took me a while to understand why.
Long before writing became such a big part of my life, I spent seventeen years making television documentaries. I eventually learned to do almost everything myself, from finding stories and conducting interviews to filming and editing.
The first documentary I ever made was awful.
I made every mistake a beginner could make. After spending the better part of a week trying to rescue the edit, I finally asked one of our experienced editors to have a look. He watched the footage for a few minutes, suggested a different structure and suddenly everything fell into place. It wasn’t that I had filmed the wrong material. I simply didn’t yet know how to shape it into a story.
That afternoon at Castlefest brought all of that back.
As soon as I started filming, it felt familiar. I instinctively knew who to approach, which questions to ask and how to collect the pieces I’d need later in the editing room. It reminded me that seventeen years of practice don’t simply disappear because you spend a few years doing other things.
The Next Chapter
On the train home, another thought crossed my mind.
Writing my first fantasy novel feels remarkably similar to making that first documentary all those years ago.
The story is there. So is the enthusiasm. What I’m still developing is the craft. Over the past year I’ve interviewed dozens of fantasy authors for the new podcast, and every conversation has taught me something. We talk about worldbuilding, rewriting, publishing and all the invisible work that goes into finishing a book. I often leave those interviews with pages of notes, not because I plan to imitate anyone else’s way of writing, but because it’s reassuring to hear how every author has learned their craft one book at a time.
That’s exactly what Castlefest reminded me of.
For one afternoon I stepped back into a profession that once felt impossibly difficult. It no longer does. Years of practice have taken care of that.
Perhaps writing works the same way.
Right now, I’m wrestling with the first rewrite of my novel, trying to solve problems that seem enormous. Maybe, years from now, I’ll look back at this manuscript the way I now look back at that first documentary.
Not with embarrassment because I was still learning, but with gratitude that I had the courage to begin.
And perhaps that’s what I really fell in love with all over again.
Not documentary making or writing.
But the joy of discovering that every hour you invest in a craft makes the next story a little better.

Fr. Roderick Vonhögen
From My Desk
* This article is based on the latest episode of The Walk. If you’d like to hear the story as I originally told it, simply press play on the podcast player at the top of this page.
* Curious about the documentary I mention in the article? I’ve started sharing a few behind-the-scenes photos and video clips on Instagram and Facebook. I’ll post updates there as the project comes together.
* Work on my Camino book continues, although at a slightly slower pace than I’d originally planned. August is also dedicated to rewriting my first fantasy novel, and I’d rather make steady progress on both projects than rush either of them.
* If you speak Dutch, you might enjoy my new podcast Fantasyfans, featuring conversations with fantasy authors, artists and cosplayers. Recent guests include Sandy Butchers, Pepijn Hamer, Cocky van Dijk, Charlotte de Winter and Arlieke van Remmerden. You can find all the episodes and articles at fantasyfans.nl.
* Meanwhile, my daily Camino series continues in my Dutch podcast Heilige van de Dag, following my pilgrimage to Santiago one saint at a time until the end of August. Earlier this week I also joined a Dutch radio program to talk about the series, and you can listen to that interview here.
* One final thing: I’m hoping to resume my live Q&A sessions on YouTube and Substack later this month. I miss talking with you in real time, so keep an eye on my social media channels for dates and announcements.


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Every creative life has one problem that success doesn’t solve. Sometimes it actually makes it worse.
Earlier this week, I found myself looking at my calendar with a growing sense of unease. It should have been a quiet week. After walking two hundred kilometres during the Nijmegen Four Days Marches, I’d planned to recover before beginning the next phase of my fantasy novel. Instead, my schedule filled itself almost overnight. Interviews in three cathedrals. Editing another series of podcasts. Publishing a few articles. Parish work. A radio interview about my Dutch podcast. And then, almost at the last minute, an invitation to Castlefest as a member of the press, my favorite fantasy festival of the year. The sensible thing would have been to stay home. Instead, I immediately started looking for my recording gear.
That’s the problem with work you genuinely enjoy. It rarely feels like work. I love interviewing authors and exploring old churches. I love telling stories about saints and meeting people who care about fantasy as much as I do. Every invitation sounds like an opportunity I shouldn’t miss. Yet somewhere along the way I realised that I was measuring success by everything I managed to fit into a week, while the project that matters most, writing my own books, kept waiting patiently for “when things calm down.” They never do.
Earlier this year, I made a public promise that I wanted to publish eight books this year (most of them already exist as drafts). It’s an absurdly ambitious goal, and I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. But I know myself well enough to understand why I set it. The number isn’t really the point. It’s a reminder of the person I’m trying to become. You don’t become a writer by thinking about books. You become a writer by protecting the time to write them. That means saying no, not only to bad ideas, but sometimes to wonderful ones as well.
So this August I’m trying something different. One chapter a day. That’s all. Not the perfect chapter, just the next one. Everything else will go on hold. Cathedrals will still be there. Festivals will return next summer. New opportunities always appear. Stories, on the other hand, only exist if someone sits down and writes them. For the next month, I want that someone to be me.
This article is based on the latest episode of my podcast The Walk. If you'd rather hear the story in my own voice, you'll find the podcast player at the top of this page.
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For four days, I walked fifty kilometres a day. I came home with sore feet, very little sleep, and a renewed faith in people.
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By Friday afternoon, every step hurt.
After four days of walking fifty kilometers a day during the Nijmegen Four Days Marches—the world’s largest multi-day walking event—I had reached the point where my feet objected to almost every surface. The next morning, the short walk to the supermarket felt harder than some of the longest stretches during the event itself.
Yet that isn't what I remember most.
What stays with me are the people.
Every village seemed determined to keep forty-five thousand walkers moving. Children stood along the road handing out cucumber slices, cookies and sweets. Churches served us free coffee. Complete strangers applauded as we passed, as if finishing the walk mattered just as much to them as it did to us. Along the route I kept running into familiar faces. Friends from the fantasy community. People I’d interviewed years ago. Listeners who recognized me from my podcasts or from my social media posts. Even the Klingon cosplayer I'd once posed with at Comic Con somehow appeared among the crowds. With tens of thousands of participants, none of those meetings should have happened. Yet they kept happening.
Walking fifty kilometres together has an interesting effect on people. Conversation becomes easier. Pretence disappears somewhere around the thirty-kilometer mark. You talk about books, life, work and dreams simply because there's nothing else to do except keep putting one foot in front of the other. I spent much of the week with friends who are organizing a new fantasy festival. We talked about storytelling, community and why so many people feel at home in worlds filled with elves, dwarves and dragons. By the end of the week I found myself sketching the mythology behind their festival in my notebook. Apparently, sore feet don't stop the imagination from wandering.
On the final day, someone said something I’ve heard after almost every fantasy convention I’ve ever attended: “I wish the real world were more like this.”
I understood exactly what she meant.
But perhaps we’ve got it the wrong way round.
Maybe this is the real world.
A place where strangers encourage one another, where generosity is the default, where differences matter less than the simple fact that we’re all traveling the same road.
The news rarely reports on that version of humanity.
But it's there.
Sometimes you just have to put on your walking shoes before you notice it.
This article is based on the latest episode of my podcast The Walk. If you'd rather hear the story in my own voice, you'll find the podcast player at the top of this page.


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