monday.

[sunfright]

Now that I have the free time and some freed energy reserves, too, to do it, there's a story idea I want to work on. I was going to do it in Danish, but I think I might end up writing it in English at the end of the day - though that isn't set in stone, yet. The setting is, for the most part, Denmark, so that might make it a bit awkward to write in English, but it's just the language I'm most comfortable with these days. And if I'm going to write an actual novel, not "just" a NaNoWriMo rebel project, well, I need it as easy as possible.

The concept is to follow the development of a woman's various love relations from the age of 12 till she's 32 and how her first love left her so stunted that she can't truly commit to the relationships that came after, until finally a friend/girlfriend of hers manages to break through the barrier. Very simple and very reliant on character work and relational stuff, but that's what I'm best at anyway. Don't make me plot things, lol, please.

I'm working on a reading list for the project, because I want to get inspiration from more than RP for this. Right now it's counting four (five) books.

Most importantly, I'll be rereading Find Me by André Aciman again. Since dropping Elio from the RP scene, I haven't touched the book, but I want to read it with fresh eyes. My story will be using the vignette style of writing that Aciman does so well, most notably in Find Me (Call Me By Your Name is more classic novel in its structure) and, as far as I can tell, in Enigma Variations, too. I've put that one of my Christmas wishlist. If I don't get it, I'm buying it myself in January.

Other than that, I'll be rereading Five Minutes in Heaven by Lisa Alther which I, honestly, haven't read in a decade. It was one of the first lesbian books I ever picked up, but we'll see if it still holds up on a later revisit. I used to love it, though. I loved it so much that I did a big assignment in school on it, I think on the use of Baudelaire in a meta-textual sense, but I actually don't really remember any longer.

Then, I hope to reread at least the first part, maybe all of it, of The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir (in Danish translation) which I've also read before and loved (and RP'ed from), because it works with some of the themes I hope to touch upon in my story as well. Childhood loves, how they affect our adult lives, that sort of stuff. Things we lose and how they shape us.

Finally, there's a Danish book that is one of my favourite novels ever, called what translates to Days With A Galopping Heart. It's an epistolary-style novel where the narrator addresses her lover in the period when she can't see her, because she is suffering from stress. It's beautifully written and shows the impact of relationships on a person's mental health. I'm kind of really looking forward to that one...

Just the fact that I feel like reading at all is a huge step for me. I haven't read novels in years and now I have four (five) lined up. Very happy about this. I'll probably give some thoughts on here as I go through them, stay tuned!