I had forgotton how much I enjoy creating fiction.

I have been doing research for my NaNoWriMo project, and I am excited about a direction in which I’m taking it. You can read up on the wiki if you feel like it, but I don’t advise you to if you don’t want to be spoiled. Anyway, things are kind of up in the air right now, and I’m not sure about some of the directions I plan to go. I think I’ve settled on a title, which makes me nervous. Ordinarily, I’m inclined to save that sort of speculation for much later, but I liked the ring of this. In scouting around for a title (I admit I was at least doing that much), I decided to pull one from a Victorian poem. Elizabeth Barrett Browning leapt to mind, so I checked out a few of her sonnets. I liked the first like from Sonnet VII in Sonnets from the Portuguese: “The face of all the world is changed, I think.” The sonnet is about how Barrett’s world had utterly changed now that she has found true love with Browning. The part of the line I like for my title is “The Face of All the World.” I told Steve I was speculating on a title, and he agreed with me that it was too early until I told him what I was thinking of. He sort of paused, and said it was a really good title. I told him the gist of the poem, as I have told you, but I think my interpretation will be a bit more twisted in the end, and I do plan to use the poem at the beginning of the book.

So that’s my working title anyway.

It’s been years since I really sat down and wrote like this. Well, technically I haven’t started yet, since I’m not supposed to start until November, but I have begun the process of sketching ideas in my head and even bits on the wiki (I suppose those are my notes).

I am finding the research interesting. I have always loved to read about Victorian England, whether it’s Dickens’ A Christmas Carol or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I was looking at Anne Perry’s website, and she was explaining that one reason she likes to write about the Victorian era is she likes “the contrast between glamour and squalor.”

That’s a woman with a story, eh?

Anyway, I think I agree with her on this.  I think there is an interesting juxtaposition of in this industrial era that is fascinating.  You have such class distinctions, but at the same time, to paraphrase Barrett Browning, the face of all the world was changing.  In some ways, we were losing our innocence.  In others, one wonders if we ever had it to begin with.