Been nearly a year since I've posted here. Probably have no readers anymore. I got busy. Life happened. It's a balance. If nothing's happening, I have time to write and nothing to write about. When life gets busy, the blog is not even on the radar.
It's been snowy, icy, rainy, sleety and foggy. Two more, and we'd have seven weather dwarfs. Five more and we could have ten weather plagues. Oh wait! We have a flood watch. How could I forget?
The stupid weather has given me some reading time. I like old books. Not the famous ones, although those are good too, but I like finding out-of-print everyday sort of novels from other eras. It's like reading historical fiction while it was contemporary. I just finished a book that takes place in the French alps in 1942, a wartime intrigue and love story. I felt like I was in the alps with these people, living the pace of mountain guides and peasants, and smuggling concentration camp escapees across the glaciers.
I don't think books that move at an everyday sort of pace get published anymore. Look at Grapes of Wrath. It takes a while for anything much to happen. But then, they weren't speeding down highways or checking twitter feeds when Steinbeck wrote it. Life was slower.
I get busy. Fast paced books appeal to me. I don't want to read 200 pages of not much of anything. I certainly don't have the desire to write that way. But I think sometimes we need to slow down. We need to remember the crickets and geese and mildew smells and sweat running off icy drinks in stifling houses with aqua blue tongue and groove walls and curtains sewn from old bedsheets. Okay. got a little carried away there.
While it might not fit into a contemporary novel, I think I might write some of that stuff for me. And maybe for later, when retro novels hit their stride. Or mostly, when the world slows back down.
It's been snowy, icy, rainy, sleety and foggy. Two more, and we'd have seven weather dwarfs. Five more and we could have ten weather plagues. Oh wait! We have a flood watch. How could I forget?
The stupid weather has given me some reading time. I like old books. Not the famous ones, although those are good too, but I like finding out-of-print everyday sort of novels from other eras. It's like reading historical fiction while it was contemporary. I just finished a book that takes place in the French alps in 1942, a wartime intrigue and love story. I felt like I was in the alps with these people, living the pace of mountain guides and peasants, and smuggling concentration camp escapees across the glaciers.
I don't think books that move at an everyday sort of pace get published anymore. Look at Grapes of Wrath. It takes a while for anything much to happen. But then, they weren't speeding down highways or checking twitter feeds when Steinbeck wrote it. Life was slower.
I get busy. Fast paced books appeal to me. I don't want to read 200 pages of not much of anything. I certainly don't have the desire to write that way. But I think sometimes we need to slow down. We need to remember the crickets and geese and mildew smells and sweat running off icy drinks in stifling houses with aqua blue tongue and groove walls and curtains sewn from old bedsheets. Okay. got a little carried away there.
While it might not fit into a contemporary novel, I think I might write some of that stuff for me. And maybe for later, when retro novels hit their stride. Or mostly, when the world slows back down.
Ahhh...the unpredictable speed of life. Lots of good points, Nina.
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