I'm sipping wine (a really good one that I'm sipping for taste and not relief) and wondering how on earth I managed to write over 600 pages double-spaced of fiction about nothing I have ever experienced in real life. I don't know if it's any good or not (it's good in spots, I kind of think, but the wine is really relaxing me so I may not be able to judge well) but I hate to throw it away because I've been writing it for three years now and the actual story itself means a lot to me.

I based some of it on truth (one of the characters is based a bit on someone I knew years ago and who meant the world to me before an irreparable rift changed things forever) but most of it is just things I imagined in my heart and mind. It's about getting past heart break and figuring how to tell the difference between what is real or what is not. 

It's also about how much crap we're willing to put up with from someone we deeply love and would even die for, someone who originally was 'runner up' to the love of the central character's life, but eventually becomes much more...the main love interest is someone I totally made up in my head, though when I reread it I kind of worry I somehow wove Blanche Dubois into her character... obviously, not as well as Tennessee Williams, and definitely not intentionally. But I do remember I was really in a Vivien Leigh phase and watching every production of A Streetcar Named Desire a lot when I first started writing.

Besides worrying about the actual writing I also wonder if you really can write about what you don't know, about things you've never done or experienced. I found some interesting articles online that offer some good advice and thoughts...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/dont-write-what-you-know/308576/

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/why-you-should-write-about-what-you-dont-know

I even found (amidst a lot of rather, shall we say, coarse advice) some words on whether you can write love scenes without experience:

...To which I reply: If a writer had to experience something in order to write it, we wouldn’t have science fiction, fantasy, or most romantic comedies. Or most romances in general, really.

I wish I could make the past few years disappear and start fresh...but since I can't I continue to read Saint Augustine's Confessions and think of what Mother Teresa would do.

“Humility is the mother of all virtues1; purity, charity and obedience. It is in being humble that our love becomes real, devoted and ardent. If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. If you are blamed you will not be discouraged. If they call you a saint you will not put yourself on a pedestal.”

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta

~Mother Teresa~

For more read here:

https://www.catholiccompany.com/blog/mother-teresas-humility-list

Sometimes it feels like your heart weighs a thousand pounds...whether you're extremely anxious or sad or trying to get past a broken relationship or one-sided love. Even though this article is from more than six years ago, I think it still has a lot to say about the broken heart. It gets it better than anything else I've read:


Heartbreak is more than just an emotional defeat; to some the pain is very real. At one point or another, everyone must experience this mind numbing feeling (unless you confine yourself to a house and never interact with even a pet) but that's not the norm and you're probably not reading this article if you've had that kind of sheltered life.

Heartbreak can be caused by many different circumstances and that's what makes this emotion easily recognized by nearly every person on the planet. It can result from the loss of a loved one, a partner, a friend and even a close pet. Or it can be caused from disappointment, betrayal or a change from known surroundings. It might not even be a loss at all but a sense of loss, or the realization that the love of the person you care most for is drifting far from where it had always been.

Love, in the same perspective as heartbreak, neither has a corrective definition nor specific amplitude implied by the physical word itself. There's a never-ending limit to the definition of love because there are so many things we love and in many different ways. There's friendship love, love for animals and possessions, love for music or hey, even food. Then there's that kind of  love that is so overwhelming perfect, passionate and meaningful, a love that you have never before been able to achieve. This is the love we're going to be talking about throughout this article, but before we can continue on, we must first understand why we as humans are constantly searching to fulfill this emotion.

A part of the desire comes from what we find most joyful in life. If you search for this answer, and look upon previous actions objectively, it's simple to say that we are satisfied by making others happy. We receive complete satisfaction from doing things for others, and this feeling increases with the intensity of love we feel towards that specific person or thing.  When you lose someone you love, you have lost the sense of purpose acquired by the relationship between them and yourself. You lose the purpose you felt when doing simple things to make them smile, and making yourself joyful in return. The cycle should continue endlessly, but as we know that could only occur in a perfect world, which this is not. Heartbreak happens, and it changes who we are for the better (in most cases) and so will it be for the rest of our lives and next.

"We of course equate the pain of loss to the intensity of the love, but that is not what is behind the pain. The more you love and feel loved, the greater the increase of your sense of purpose because when you do something for just anyone and they do not appreciate it; your sense of purpose is not completely satisfied. It requires seeing who you are helping, and their appreciation to make it complete." says personal developer, David Samuel.

Read more: http://www.science20.com/variety_tap/science_behind_heartbreak-33900#ixzz3Yv4dOrxJ




http://www.science20.com/variety_tap/science_behind_heartbreak-33900

I am fighting another night of no sleep and feeling a bit tossed and thinking about how happy I was in college...how magical it was, almost...and then I go on Facebook (something I don't do much of anymore) and I see an update from someone I adored way back then. She was probably the first person I ever really saw as a role model who wasn't a teacher or favorite author.

We met one day in the cafeteria. She was so fascinating...her hair all adorably messy, her eyes bright and wide, her hands carrying a fully loaded tray with a tattered copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude tucked under one arm. She had this energy that drew me to her right away. And she was a junior while I was a freshman so there was also that aspect of "looking up to" to as well.

We would end sharing several classes together the two years we overlapped and I loved her take on all the different stories and novels we read in our Irish fiction course. Often, we would traipse to the dining hall together discussing something we had just read. Her mind was wonderfully wild and it turned out she could sing and dance (really, really well) and was theatrically bound.

Before I met her I had never heard of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She spoke of him in way that made it impossible not to read him. Though her dreams were for Broadway (and she certainly could have made it there) she ended up becoming a well-respected writer, which only seems fitting, given how much passion she had for books when I knew her in college.

I remember the nerve it took me to Facebook her a while back. "What is she remembers how dorky I was around her?" I worried. "Or what if she knew I had a crush on her?" She always was kind to me and often patted me on the head (somehow this didn't insult me because it had happened before and still does with other people) and I just always had the sense she kind of knew and it didn't bother her. Still, I was pleasantly surprised when she not only accepted my request, but wrote me a nice note back.

She is probably the one (of the very few) people I ever had feelings for that I could be perfectly normal around. Maybe it was because she could put anyone at ease and had the most terrifically bizarre sense of humor and she accepted everyone.

Tonight, when I saw her photo (with a favorite professor of mine whom I also looked up to and who gave me my crazy passion for Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne) I felt joy. She is really, really happy, I thought, her dreams have come true and she is doing what she loves and she deserves it so very much. I remember her for so many reasons and I will never forget her for how she made people feel when they were around her: alive and thriving.

etsy.com

Sleeping At Last just released a new cover of Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars." It's wretchedly painful to listen to, but maybe 'wretchedly' isn't the right word since this is a 'wretched' that the soul sometimes needs to unburden itself and everything about this is just gorgeous.

This is so incredibly sad it physically hurts to listen. I totally failed my 'if I can make it through without crying' I'll be fine test...it's just achingly beautiful and really unleashes something within. Make sure you're somewhere safe if you listen because you are most likely going to cry your eyes out.