I am on the verge of an international adventure in the beautiful country of Italy and I don’t think there’s any way I’m going to get over there and not write.
I have a gorgeous notebook I received as a gift especially for this trip and the settings of Rome, Florence, and Venice are bound to be rich places to use it.
What I will write about, I’m not totally decided, but inspiration has struck me at the strangest moments on my previous travels. I wrote a novelet about the Sirens of Greek myth on the plane flight out to Lebanon and finished it in my grandparent’s living room up in a little mountain village.
Travel awakens senses that we otherwise ignore, because suddenly everything is new. I can’t ignore the chair I’m sitting in, or the scenery outside, or the way that the people around me are dressed because suddenly everything isn’t familiar anymore.
I don’t speak any Italian worth mentioning, though James has been practicing it using the Rosetta Stone and we’ve been paging through the Rick Steve’s Italian phrasebook. I enjoyed the “Help for Women” page in which I learned tu sei disgustoso! (you are disgusting!) and sparisca! (get lost!), and my favorite crepi! (drop dead!). I’ll be traveling with James, so I hope these rebukes won’t actually come in handy.
I have a few goals for my trip–I want to record everything we do so that I can look back and remember it in detail, I want to take lots of pictures, I want to become a human sponge and soak up as many details as I can, I want to take every opportunity to seize the moment and enjoy the romance of Italy with James (he says he doesn’t care how expensive the gondola rides are, we’re going on one!).
I also have a book idea that I’m hoping to use for NaNoWriMo (learn more about what that is here) that would be set in a fantasy land loosely based on Italian culture and architecture, so I want to do some immersion research for that as well.
Are my goals ambitious? Always. 🙂 I’ll be in touch when I’m back to let you know how it went!
Ciao!
