Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Winter Plans

Last night I ran my kids out for a tasty treat.  Apparently my ten-year-old is having a bit of a growth spurt or is part hobbit - he needed second dinner.  We were shocked and surprised to see the car was covered with snow.  By the time we returned, the grass was white.  We got very excited about the potential for a two-hour delay in the morning.  There's nothing better than an extra two hours of sleep when you normally wake up at 5:30.  Unfortunately, it melted overnight, and my alarm went off too early as usual.

Besides the excitement of the unexpected snow and the sugar high from the tasty treat, something else happened to me, something that's been simmering for a while.  When it's cold outside and spring is no where near, I become strangely attracted to and want to snuggle up with ... medieval literature.  That's right.  Beowulf, Chaucer, and that anonymous guy that wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight turn me on.  (Hopefully my husband is reading this and comes home armed with some Old English poems...not likely.)

Before I began my current adventure/obsession with writing fiction, I had began executing my plan to go to graduate school and do the thing I always wanted to do besides writing novels:  teaching writing and literature at a college, any college, especially a basic community college.  What could be better than helping people write better and appreciate literature?  For me, not much. 

I was enrolled in classes, had purchased books, and was ready to go to class when doctor two (of four) and physical therapist one (of three) informed me I wouldn't actually be able to walk any time soon.  I cried for a day or two, disenrolled, started working on the novel I just finished editing, and finished the first version of a middle reader I had been working on since my initial injury. 

Graduate school was out of the question, but now it isn't.  The only real obstacle (besides the current flare up of nerve pain in my foot) is that I have been out of college for twenty years.  The older I get, the more babies I have, the fewer hours I sleep, the more fuzzy my memory of Shakespeare and Milton becomes. 

I'm not giving up on writing, I just want more, something else to occupy my mind while my kids are at school.  Beginning tomorrow, I plan to write only one chapter a day, every day.  That gives me extra time that I can fill with doing laundry and dishes or something better...like reading Chaucer. 

This winter I plan to snuggle up with dead poets and get lost in stories I read when I was a lot younger.  I expect my perspective has changed a lot over the years, so maybe it will be like reading them for the first time.  

Since my memory is really bad, I set up a blog to write my notes on authors and individual pieces as I go.  If you are interested, my new blog is Escape into Literature.  If you aren't, it won't hurt my feelings at all if you avoid it.  I expect zero followers since I know lovers of medieval literature are not abundant.  I intend to post only when I finish reading an individual piece, hopefully at least twice a week.

I hope you all find something (or someone) equally wonderful to snuggle up with this winter.

5 comments:

  1. Smiles to you! There are peeps who like medevial lit.

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  2. I plan on snuggling up with the 50 - 60 books I got a Borders this summer when they marked their books down 80 and 90%. I only read two books in November, I need to do much better than that or I'll never get through my stack.

    Good luck with your Medieval literature, I used to read Thor comic books when I was a kid. Also, my wife talks about that movie... A Knights Tale, so that's about it for me and literature of the period.

    Okay, not really, but still....

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  3. Shelly - It's good I'm not all alone. :)

    Rusty - Funny. No Lord of the Rings? It's sort of like medieval lit. Beowulf is next on my list. Maybe tomorrow.

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  4. I don't have any experience of medieval literature at all. My friend studied it at school, but somehow I bypassed it, so I honestly can't say if I love it or hate it. I do quite like the older style of writing found in some books though.

    A chapter a day still sounds pretty good to me. My writing, at present, has had to be relegated to weekends :(.

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  5. CD - When I was working full time, I didn't write at all. There's only so much time. I like to write on the weekend too - my husband usually takes care of my tiny person so I can focus.

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