Best Laid Plans and the Greatest Eyebrows That Ever Lived

So even after writing about 30 pages worth of material for my serialized romance idea, I've let the whole thing drop while doing my usual working/looking for a better job/moping/going out for coffee/reading/walking the dog thing (on repeat for several months!). My friends were all really excited about the story but the first segment desperately needs proofreading and I'm not sure if I'm confident enough to "publish" something I've written, even on a blog.

Anyway, in case anyone is reading this, I haven't abandoned the idea. I've just put it on hold.

In the meantime, I'm wasting my life following the second season of True Blood on HBO and attempting to watch all of Gregory Peck's movies, minus Boys From Brazil, because he's very unsexy in that movie and sexiness is what inspired this project in the first place. So far I've watched Duel in the Sun, David O. Selznick's ridiculous attempt to top Gone with the Wind, and Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, which is great for the Dali-inspired dream sequence and the love story between Ingrid Bergman's prim psychoanalysist and Peck's unbalanced asylum inmate.

Hooray! An Idea! And a Post!

Inspired by so many romantic movies and books with a time-travel or time-cross motif (The Time Traveler's Wife, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Possession) and by the throw-away brilliance of South American radio serials celebrated in Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, I'm working on serializing a story about a victorian couple who, due to a family legend, remains youthful and alive as long as they love each other. Before you throw up, I think it's going to focus as lot on the fashion and general zeitgeist of each decade of the 20th Century, beginning in the year 1900, going back and forth between England and America, finally culminating in Oxford, 2006. I'm probably going to rely pretty heavily on my own limited experience of both nations, my obsession with historical fiction, and not get too caught up in accuracy. I think this is going to be a fun way to exercise my writing skills and let my friends (or anyone!) read and comment on the story as it progresses. I will probably upload the first segment on Tuesday.