Waking Up & Great Love Stories

These last few weeks I feel like I'm finally coming awake after a long, long sleep. This is both literal and metaphorical. I've finally weaned myself off of sleeping pills that I'd been taking for two years, and I hadn't realized how much they'd been affecting my waking life until I stopped taking them. I knew I hadn't really felt passionate about anything artistic for a long while, but I thought it was just creative and physical exhaustion. My CFS had been kicking my butt since May and I've spent most of the summer stuck on my couch or in bed. And then there was the vertigo that completely immobilized me for a few weeks there.

BUT! So as to not go on like your grandmother listing off all her weird health problems, suffice it to say, physical therapy has helped the vertigo, the CFS has finally chilled out a bit, and life without sleeping pills has become suddenly more vibrant and alive in a way I hadn't realized I was missing until it has returned.

I find that my imagination is finally spinning again in a way that it hadn't for a long while. I've had three fully realized novel ideas this past month, wrote about twenty pages of each of them, and have settled on a project I feel so passionate about I wake up grinning I'm so excited to get started working on it.

I've also been watching a slew of movies that are full of the passionate ideals I'm trying to touch on in my writing. Most recently, Moulin Rouge, which is the perfect mix of ridiculous camp and stop-your-heart melodrama. I love me my melodrama. Those are the kinds of stories I love to devour as a reader and the kind of stories I want to create as a writer. As I was settling on the WIP idea I wanted most to work on, I was thinking about the kind of story I wanted to write.

First and foremost, I want to write a love story. And I want to write a love story about how the intersection of two people meeting and falling in love can change the entire course of their lives. This idea is near and dear to me: it's been my personal experience of love. I met the most amazing man on my first day of college, and our being together (through both good times and bad) has been the single most important factor in directing the paths my life has taken. I think about it sometimes--how very different our lives would have been if we hadn't met. I think about certain decisions and events that could have so easily happened a different way so that we'd never crossed each other's acquaintance. I've been married ten and a half years. A person is bound to change in that amount of time, and if you are very lucky, you learn how to change together in ways that continue to be compatible with one another. I've been incandescently happy in my marriage lately, but I think any great love, whether it ends happily or in tragedy, changes you, and those are the stories I want to read and write about.

Some of the movies I've been watching recently that highlight the kind of love that changes everything: