January Time Traveling

This month there’s a lot of snow, and worse, ice, here in Massachusetts. I think gardening books may sell more now than at any other time of year, though I haven’t researched that. We mark our calendars for the bulb shows promised at local colleges coming not quite soon enough, where the air is fragrant with green leaves and blossoms that make breathing much more fun.

And sometimes we hit a winter in our writing. I have a solid draft of my work in progress, some of which is set in nineteenth century Rome, some in Boston. I began the novel-in-verse with research about those places as well as the central character’s life. I’ve been working on the narrative arc and honing lines for a while and feel not exactly stuck, but hemmed in, the way the icy driveway makes me think twice about heading anywhere. Tucking the manuscript away for a while is one smart way to know I’ll come back to it fresh, but I’m not quite at that point. So yesterday I made a trip to the library and went through the travel sections.

I generally keep to a regimen set when my daughter was going to school of writing during school hours, then doing research, which doesn’t take as much concentration for me, after 3 p.m. So today in late afternoon here are some of the books I’ll daydream over.



These are places where my character walked, though I’ll have to check dates. (yay for Italy which keeps a lot the same, and I’m sorry about Boston, a city I love, which with good reason has changed a lot in 150 years). Photographs from old books help me imagine things my character saw. I do have a question: did confessionals in St. Peter’s look as they do now? But mostly I’m hoping for the luck of finding an image that may pull together holes, or start a new thread, or just plain sparkle, and carry me happily back to work.