venturing onward.

I've been thinking a lot about where I want this blog to go, or what I want it to be, and today I had an inkling. So I tweaked the name a bit and brought it closer to my original inspiration for, well most things! The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery, published in 1926. It's her only book for adults, and its one of my favorite books, wherein Valancy Stirling -- 29, unmarried, and undesired, sets about changing her life.

Her real life, in a word, sucks, and so she's found a way to escape:

"Valancy, so cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real life, was wont to let herself go rather splendidly in her day-dreams. Nobody in the Stirling clan, or its ramifications, suspected this, least of all her mother and Cousin Stickles. They never knew that Valancy had two homes--the ugly red brick box of a home, on Elm Street, and the Blue Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that castle. Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble steps, with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens going up and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering fountains fell and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of mirrors that reflected only handsome knights and lovely women--herself the loveliest of all, for whose glance men died. All that supported her through the boredom of her days was the hope of going on a dream spree at night. Most, if not all, of the Stirlings would have died of horror if they had known half the things Valancy did in her Blue Castle."

As found as I am of castles in the clouds... and I have a little patch of imaginary woodland that serves much the same purpose as Valancy's castle ... right now I am trying to figure out how to make the imagined manifest. So here at the junction of imagination and reality is my Blue Cottage. Let's see what there is to fill it with!!