Lorna the Librarian

I have finished NaNoWriMo 2011, my third; and now have over 200,000 words in a manuscript.

This past month I’ve been sequestered in the years 1811 to 1841: I have loved and lost for three characters; caught the square-rigged George Washington on the Waterloo dock bound for New York City; reread Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; played Portia and Antonio at the Theater Royale; mapped out a Glaswegian Street and peopled it with 1839 residents, the butcher, baker and yes, the spirit dealer. I have read documents on Scottish law for servants, merchants, and ne’er-do-wells and made a phaeton carriage. I know something about the Glasgow abolitionists, merchants, playwrights, actors and tobacco lords. I have perused songs written in the early nineteenth century. I have read a novel on the Jamaica plantation system published in 1828. I better understand the Greek rebellion of 1820 and how it affected wee Cyprus and lunched with the British consul in Larnaka.  I have studied Scot’s lingo in dictionaries and in podcasts. I have buried myself under stacks of memories, ancestry records and family folklore. So with that I am going to take a little break and mop my kitchen floor, finish my Anne Tyler novel, sell Usborne and Scholastic titles this Thursday, order books for that coming visit of David Schwartz in February, do mid-semester grades, and enjoy the holiday spirit.

Oh, to be a librarian, a writer, a dreamer, and editor. Within the year, this totie, wee thing will have more than a name and a soul.