I'm Still Here

Funny, but I have been so incredibly busy lately that I haven't thought of my blog in a long, long time.  Just wanted to let you know I am still here:  trudging through the final weeks of grad school, still trying to write in between seemingly insurmountable reading assignments.  I have actually started writing some fiction, and I hope to continue to get deeper into some of the stories I have started recently.  I have 3 1/2 weeks left of coursework, but I hope to return soon to bring out some of my writing and some of the things that have inspired me these days.   

Until then, here is a quote by Virginia Woolf that has got me thinking as of late, and amazingly reflects my own life:

"I have no time to describe my plans.  I should say a good deal about The Hours, and my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.” 

I have carved out a little niche for myself here at home, my own cave, a room of my own, and I am anxious to get all those words down on paper.  The novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham inspires me to try my hand at fiction and perhaps a novel, someday.  Here is one of my favorite passages:

"Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citzenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment...It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book...What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other." The Hours, Michael Cunningham