literature

Whoa – Abelard and Heloise

/ Varza / Leave a comment

Abelard and Heloise Grave in Paris

My history professor has a saying that ‘sometimes when you read a book there is a line that you come across that makes you go – that is a good sentence/line’ and I absolutely love when you come across these when reading letters from the past. I recently read the book “The Letters of Abelard and Heloise” and had this happen several times. One of the things about reading real, intense love letters from the past I can’t help but wonder if this is a lost art. Do people still write intense love letters to one another or just shorts notes to each other. Sexy texts?

I have to share my favorite which is from the controversial Abelard, a person who most people end up hating when reading this book


To a soul brighter and dearer to me than anything the earth has produced, the flesh which that same soul causes to breathe and move; whatever I owe her through whom I breathe and move.

To his jewel, more pleasing and more splendid than the present light, that man who without you is shrouded in dense shadows: what else except that you glory unfailingly in your natural brilliance.

Man! How beautiful is that?! I want my hubs to write words like this for me. How could you not feel powerfully loved by someone who speaks such about you?

Another Fall Semester

/ Varza / 7 Comments

ImageIn 5 days time I will be starting another semester of college and I know I am looking forward to a heavy semester. I am glad though that the oxygen machine I received to help with my sleep apnea seems to be working and I have had at least a week and a half of full sleep in the past month. Having started out with only sleeping for a few hours of sleep with the mask on – I have now worked up with a consistent 6-8 hours of sleep in 4 nights out of 7 without ripping the mask off in my sleep. 

I have felt that metabolism has been bumped up, seeing as I am actually hungry during the daytime now and not just eating because I need to. Hopefully, this means that I will hopefully start losing some weight just from my natural metabolism working correctly. This, I hope will help with my classes this fall. That I won’t struggle as much as I did in the Spring semester. But my biggest concern is that I will  hopefully not lose time for my writing.

This is one of my concerns because my story is going so well and I do not want to lose momentum. Especially with the writers conference coming up next month. I had planned on having the manuscript done by the time school started, if not the final rough draft that would only have to be edited over the next four weeks. Instead, I have 3/4 of a novel to still write. Somehow I need to manage, along with homework and spending time with my child & husband, to write about 60,000 more words of my novel. Continue the plotting for it and writing a glossary for the world I am creating.

I am looking forward to this semester though because I am finally starting to take the upper level courses for my major/minor instead of only required classes. I will be studying a lot on two of my favorite topics: mythology and English history. I have a feeling my struggle course will be my linguistics class since I have no idea what it will be about, well other then the history of English language. l’sigh
Wish me luck and less stress over the next 18 weeks. Oh, and weight loss. Image

Almost Finished! Not

/ Varza / 2 Comments

Yoda-Do-or-do-not-there-is-no-try1

Here is the deal with trying to writing, it is a never-ending process. I had an outline of my story when I began: start here – go here – end here. I am almost to the end of my first draft, a very rough first draft and I am just over a month out with my 15 minutes with an agent to pitch it. Now I have to decide what I am going to do with it. Do I revise it, change the story completely while keeping the cast of characters, or do I “pitch it” to the side. This last idea is not something I want to do but I am not happy with the way the story has come out. The end has been a struggle to put together and find the right words to type.

I have been made to believe by some that my story doesn’t have enough conflict or will come off “lectury” because of the story I want to tell. I want to… NEED TO finish this story, this book. I haven’t finished anything in the past and I can’t keep quitting when it becomes a struggle to write my stories. Like my reading pile, I also have a pile of stories I want to write as they constantly come to mind, creating new files with documents with the basics of the story that comes up. In the last month, I have written down the basic ideas for eight different stories. They keep coming to my mind but I can’t let myself be distracted. It would be so easy to just change over to one of those other ideas without finishing this one. But then nothing gets done, does it?

batman-writeI can blame these delays on writer’s block, but I am not really blocked just stuck. I want to write, I attempt to get something out each day but I have skipped a few in the past few weeks because of personal events. One day was to spend an entire day with my family; which we haven’t been able to do because of schedule conflicts and a lot of different big chores going on. Another was because my mind was elsewhere because of having to get a biopsy done on my back – which is probably nothing. And the last was because I sat there for two hours and couldn’t come up with a single thing to put down on paper. Making me wish that I had someone to “snap me out of it” at these moments.

Part of these doubts come from whether it will be good enough. Who wants to write something they put everything into then have it slammed by reviewers? I have spent my life reading amazing novels, watching incredible stories on the screen and I wonder at the end of the night how I could even attempt to put my work in the same category as these. It’s not that my writing sucks but it is the intimidation of the amazing things I have read because no matter what someone says… they want their book to be a success. You don’t write and publish something just for yourself. Stories are written and created to be enjoyed by others. Others who aren’t the creator. I want my stories to be read and enjoyed… not for fame but because that is why it exists in the first place. That is its job – to be read. Without being read it’s just words on a page, ignored and forgotten.

So, my story will one day be finished but not anytime soon. It’s still incubating in my head.

ETA: I just realized that on July 6 I had around 30K words. Today I broke 50K. Pretty dang good.