saturday.

New layout for the journal. I haven't made any changes to the looks of my journal since I made it, so when I found this layout, I decided it was time. I really love the big image in the sidebar that kind of stabilizes the entire thing... It's a collage I made back during my first La Sylphide craze and it still feels relevant. Plus, the colours.

The past two days, we've been sick, my girlfriend and I. The flu. K. has been in bed most of this time and has had it hard, whereas I have been better off, thanks to the flu shot I got some months ago. I've been able to feel I was sick, sure, but mostly I've been up and about. Still, I had a whole weekend of plans that I had to cancel, because I don't want to infect anyone else. Was a bit sad about tomorrow, where I was supposed to go to a X-mas party and meet my friend's new girlfriend for the first time, but like she says... We can do it some other time, when she hasn't invited three people over from various parts of the country who could take the flu with them back to where they came from. Not to mention, her girlfriend is from the UK and I don't want her to get sick either. Not so close to X-mas, especially.

I began writing something new yesterday. It was the only productive thing I could manage. It's in Danish this time, which is a first in... at least a couple of years. It just sort of happened. I've had this idea for a fic for while, planning to write it in English, but it wanted itself out differently. I think I talked about it earlier, inspired by Find Me by André Aciman and his vignette-style of writing? I started the first vignette which is the story of young love, two 13 year old girls' exploration of friendship, relationships and sexuality. So far I really like it, though it's weird to be back in the Danish idiom. I'm probably still a little stiff and English-inspired in my phrasings, but part of it really works anyway, so maybe that's just how it'll be.

Also, pipisafoat got me the last edits on Humility back, my Manon/Marguerite fanfic, so now I've finished my work on that! I will be putting up part three tomorrow. Part four, next Sunday. So proud of this fic, it's definitely a main work of mine. Looking forward to working on more English work soon. I might have an idea for an Effy fic from La Sylphide... Actually, I might already have started (also yesterday, I had a lot of time on my hands, okay)... It's going to be a verse novel-style thing.

Posting the first part of it beneath the cut.

( it always goes downhill... )

Rest of the weekend will be spent doing nothing much. Writing some more, probably. Drinking a lot of tea. Luckily I had a whole stash of chamomile tea with honey infusion and vanilla which is delicious, warming and goes straight to a sick system. We've got food at home, so no need to go out at all. We'll be fine.

And hey, if we're sick now, the chances of catching anything before X-mas, if we're just careful, is relatively small. It's the little blessings.

Wishing you all calm and wellness, whatever that is to you.

saturday.

I've started on A Woman Appeared to Me again, a semi-biographical novel by Renée Vivien who was a symbolist/lesbian/feminist writer from the early 20th century (AWAtM was published in 1904) that I to this day cannot remember how I learned about, probably Wikipedia scrolling, tbh, but anyway - at one point during my manic twenties, I managed to get my hands on an English translation, until recently the only one in circulation, by the Naiad Press. In recent years, both AWAtM and some of her poetry and short stories have been translated into English and I've put those books on my wishlist for X-mas, hoping I'll get some if not all of them. I love her very flavourful, in some ways purple prose and I love the Symbolist style in general, it's right up my alley. Humility was probably vaguely inspired by Vivien.

I have an RP character from around this time period, Germaine Dupont, and she's a writer. One of the books I've headcanon'ed that she has written is a novel called, The Faithless, described as such on her profile: The story of two girls, bosom buddies, who believe in the same story of guardian angels, but as they grow older, only one retains the belief, while the other outgrows it and resultantly, they outgrow each other. The girl who did not give up her faith is visited, in the end, by her guardian angel. And this summary gave me an idea for a story I could write, set in the same time and maybe written in something akin to the Symbolist idiom. It could be a fun challenge. So, I made an RP character for that, journal named in honour of A Woman Appeared to Me.

I need to read up on angelology, though, for this to work, so I might look a bit into that later tonight. (Spoiler: I'm looking it up now)...

I've had some trouble picking out music today. Normally I know almost exactly what I'm in the mood for, but today I needed something classical that wasn't either too dramatic or too introspective, so none of my usual guys worked, re: Chopin or Debussy or Beethoven. However, I've followed the channel of a young French composer, contempoary, who composes very lovely music and one of his earliest compositions was a nocturne inspired by The Lady of the Camellias, followed by two other "Romantic Ladies" pieces, a waltz for Delphine de Girardin and an intermezzo for Marie d'Agoult. This recording is his own performance of all three. I really love these pieces and find them extremely soothing to listen to, so that's where I ended up today.

Watch on YouTube

We're getting take-away tonight, still completely worn out by the flu. Still, we've been a little active today, so it's definitely getting better. It's snowed outside, so there's the thinnest powdery snow lying everywhere, so pretty.

I will leave you with a quote from A Woman Appeared to Me, it's from the prologue, introduced with a fragment of writing by a character called San Giovanni and it goes like this:

Friendship is more dangerous than love, since its roots are stronger and go deeper than the roots of love. The anguish of friendship is more bitter than the anguish of love. Certain souls love friendship as others love love; they suffer through friendship as others through love. They have in their lives only one friendship as others have but a single love. It is when they lose friendship that they despair hopelessly. And it is when they despair thus that they find happiness. For happiness is like the magnificence of ruins.

How beautiful is that?