My Literary People

Do you ever get in that situation in which you have been working at something diligently, but then you have one long conversation and suddenly there's this great big new thing out there too? 


Yeah... that's what happens when I get with my literary people. I have a few of them. If you go back through the poems on the site you'll see some commentary from one of them. I had dinner and drinks with the other a few days ago and let's just say after listening to way to much about Dr. Who (series 5 and 6) and her latest literary triumphs and opportunities, I'm getting the feeling like I've got something new brewing. I've been working on world building for a particular world for a few years. I've got characters and even some plot line. I know everything except what happens in the middle (which is the worst place to be stuck). 


But since this set of conversations I had recently, I've been having weirder dreams than usual (which is quite difficult for me - I always have strange, outlandish dreams) and I can feel the cogs turning up in my brain. There's something on the move. I don't know if it'll be something new or an adjustment to something old, but there's something moving around and ticking up there. I guess there's nothing to do but wait until it's a bit more formed.


What do you do when you have an idea forming?

Book Challenge Update

I did not get a chance to update my book challenge yet this week. I finished The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. 


I must say, I really love this story. It's, of course, a great growing story full of morals and directives about how to be a good person, how to help children be good people and the loveliness and lessons we can learn from gardening. LOVE IT! 


It makes me want even more to start my own greenhouse. It's a pet idea that I've had floating around the back of my mind for a few years. 


Anyways - back to the book. I finished it Tuesday and began reading Little Women for the third time. It's another book I love. Alcott has such interestingly eternal thoughts. Plus, it is hard to pull me away from the transcendentalists (but not as difficult as it is pulling them away from Unitarian thought... hahaha ha ha.... no one gets my literary joke or finds it funny.


Thus, I have completed the twelfth book on my journey to tri-deca-dom. Or something like that. 


12/30 books completed.

Book Challenge Update... Again

Another book down. Today I finished Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I had never read it. I think I've read Through the Looking Glass, but I'm not quite sure. 


I loved the sense of child-logic and frustrations of having to change one's outlook on the world as one changes. It's such a growing up story, but dressed in such fantastic nonsense that it's just as easily hidden as it is revealed to the reader. It's almost like a fast-forward dream of being a teenager. 


This is book 10/30 read this year. 

Stolen

Someone has stolen something from you (or your character). Something of tremendous value. What will you do to get it back? Or will you give up?

Write a post - fiction or non - and tell us about it. Word limit is 600.

Today's prompt comes from Red Writing Hood. I had a pretty hard time coming up with an idea for this one, which I found strange. Shouldn’t this be one of the easiest things to come up with? Maybe…

Stolen

I sat up in the night, not from a dream or a nightmare, but from the sound of the door of the apartment opening. I listened for a moment, breath held tight. The door shut and someone giggled, another voice shushing the first.  Another late night out for the flat mates then…

I lay back down, closing my eyes but not to sleep. What was it that was happening before I woke? It felt like there should have been something going on. I was asleep and… I reached out in my mind, willing myself to find anything there, but no. Just darkness. Emptiness.

It had been this way for months. I didn’t remember when it had started, but no those are the wrong words too. I didn’t remember when they had stopped – my dreams. From an age before I was cognizant of such things, I had dreamed – vivid dreams, subtle dreams.

“Why don’t you write them down and make them a novel?” he once asked, “You have more ridiculous junk happen in your dreams than these silly vampire novelists have all put together.”

Ridiculous junk. He had always thought so. Other people called them “strange” or even, in my mother’s words, “nightmarish”, but not to me. To me they were just something that another part of my being was trying to tell me.

I sometimes used to wake up with a sense of urgency – the need to remember, to know what had happened in the dream, because it was real and meaningful. Other times I would awake confused – how did that end up in my head, where did it come from? Only once or twice did I wake up in fear. Dreams that frightened others at the thought were no source of terror to me. On the few occasions I did have a nightmare, they were memorable, but thankfully not re-livable.

But this seemed all in the past to me. What had once remained in my waking life had now invaded my dreamscape – a pressure, a dampening. As my daily self lost its vigor, its intention, its vitality, so did my dreams. I could manage the day to day, but the loss of my nightly reflections was unbearable. I mourned.

The doctors called it depression. My friends called it “a damn shame that someone like that could hurt someone like you.” I didn’t really call it anything – not until it was much too late.

The life that I had been living and pursuing had become a confused muddle of daily routine and wandering. I had dealt with this before – losing my way, but then I had my dreams to ground me, to help me reflect, to turn to for understanding. Now they were gone too. Stolen.