a propos of some great romantic tale

I've hit the point with the NaNo that it's been going along blisteringly quickly (well, sort of - I haven't had to be on campus since Monday afternoon and so I've been glued to my computer transcribing the conversations in my head) until late last night. Thursday night was particularly awesome. Something about turkey nomming and staying up until 3am writing was awesome - there's actually some sort of a chance that I'll hit 50K by the end of the month. Weirdness. I really didn't think I'd get anywhere near that.

Anyway, so I finally hit the point where I could reintroduce the romantic interest to the MC and I've realized that what I'm attempting to do is more or less a combination of Jane Austen's Persuasion and the film Before Sunset (the Before Sunrise part, as long as I'm thinking of it in those terms, is mixed in via flashbacks to the first part of the book. I think. It's all written out separately and waiting for me to figure out how to order it in). Part of me is amused by this since I'm roughly the age of the protagonists of Before Sunset and only a year older that Miss Anne Eliot - I find myself wondering if there's something about hitting almost-30 that makes one prone to reexamining those first loves (recognizing at the same time that Austen herself was well beyond 30 when she actually wrote Persuasion, but, you know, details or whatever). Maybe there really aren't any new ideas at all anymore (not that I ever thought I was covering anything new).

The other thing that I think is sort of strange about all of this is that I didn't have one of those grandly all-encompassing loves when I was in my very early 20s that I could then reflect back on now. I've certainly spent time rethinking the old romances, but part of that has happened in realizing that I never had one of the really big crazy "I'm devoting my whole soul to you" type romances at a young age. I was prone to the occasional life-threatening crush, especially on one particular guy in college with these ridiculously blue eyes who was kind enough to be friends with me but never take me to bed. He treated the women he dated really badly (he was hot, knew he was hot, and responded to this by cheating on his girlfriends all the time), and so I think I was really lucky that I never got mixed up in any of that. The way things were, he just got to be a crush. We used to walk to class together when we both lived in the dorms, just talking about whatever, and I remember really specifically one hangover where I ran into him in the cafeteria right before it closed as I was attempting, in my pajamas, to convince myself that if I were to eat some scrambled eggs that they'd stay down. He took pity on me, sat with me while I ate (erm, attempted to eat) and regaled me with a few of his choicer hangover stories. He knew I thought he was gorgeous (I told him so at the bus stop one day after an English class) - he probably just enjoyed having an ardent (if nauseous) audience for his stories. We managed to overlap at parties all the way through college, and through some weird accident he ended up seated directly behind me at graduation (a good feat, given there were something like 6,000 people graduating that day and we weren't the same major). For all that, I don't think we ever even hugged. I have no clue what happened to him, and no desire to find out. It's interesting to me though that when I think through this, he's the one that comes to mind - not any of the guys I actually dated or loved or anything else - what I think of is the almost- but ultimately un-attainable crush.

Brownie forever says that I'm not a romantic. I can't decide if I think he's right or not. I know romance as such is something that I tend to keep very much internalized - it's there, but no one, often even my husband, really experiences it - and Brownie's experienced more of it than anyone else. I'm nervous to death to let anyone else read the NaNo writings because so much of the internalized romance is out there, even if in the muted, disillusioned way that I usually externalize it - that sort of mode that is captured so masterfully in the texts mentioned above (and which I would dearly love to kid myself I'd be someday capable of imitating). I don't know what it says about me that I was in love with Persuasion by the end of junior high but didn't discover cheesy high school romance novels until late in grad school (although who am I kidding - it's partially to figure that shit out that I'm scribbling this all down now).

Dammit. I feel like I had it for a moment, but lost it as I was typing out that last parenthetical. Keep thinking.

Maybe what I really like is the idea of being able to (re)gain a sense of romance after severe disillusionment or disappointment - the idea that love doesn't end with high school or college, that love stories are just as potent (if not moreso, more honest) when we've experienced enough to have a better sense of what's out there and how great and terrible it can be. That when we're smarter and jaded about everything, there can still be that magic. It may be harder to find, but that might make it all the more wonderful.