Life Now and Back Then

It’s funny, isn’t it—a lot of times when the most life is happening the least gets written down! Sorry for inexplicably neglecting my blog last week. Between all life’s activities, and my only computer time going to copy editing (I love copy editing!), it had to be omitted. For my birthday on January 20, I had fun things to do with friends on Tuesday and Wednesday.

And then I got sick. With a 72-hour stomach flu. Now, recovering from it (my memory will be scarred for a while yet), I have a renewed enthusiasm for life. And the thing I missed most was writing. I’d been away from it the longest, after all, doing plenty of everything before I got sick, except writing. I’m at the awkward place where a WIP’s first draft is done but not quite ready to be edited, so I’ve been an itinerant writer, never working on any one thing for a while and feeling dissatisfied because of it. I don’t like writing breaks.

Although I hate being sick, recovering from it is one of the best feelings! I thank God it wasn’t worse and didn’t last longer, and I’m thankful for the energy I now have. For all you who are or who have been sick this winter, my empathy extends to you!

And now, on to another part of my post. For some time now I’ve been dwelling on the Victorian age. It’s one of my favorite periods in which to immerse myself, so while it wasn’t wholly planned, one thing led to another, and here I am, submerged. I read Idylls of the King and am finishing up a selection of other Tennyson poems (Tennyson was England’s poet laureate from 1850 to his death in 1892); I’m reading Cranford (by one of my favorites, Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell); recently listened to some Sherlock Holmes mysteries on Librivox; watched the most recent Sherlock (The Abominable Bride, set in the 1890s; I watched it while I was sick); and am watching the BBC miniseries Little Dorrit (set in the 1820s, but written by Charles Dickens in the 1850s. I love it!). 

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All this makes me contemplate the era, of course. It reaffirms my sense that if I could ever apply myself to intensively study any one historical time and place, it would be 19th-century England. I would love to gain a better understanding of what it was really like back then, and trace how what they did then affects us now. Plus it’s just plain fascinating!

What have you been into lately? Have you dabbled in anything from the Victorian age recently?