Crash Courses

I've had a major slow down in word production on Spring Fever, my NaNo novel, this week. When the words stopped flowing and I found myself all in a tangle on Tuesday, (a great disappointment after such a feverish start,) I began spending more time on the various crash courses I needed to flesh out the plot and the character's lives.

See my TT this week for a glimpse into the story and an idea of how many topics are involved. It is to be expected, I suppose, when you have two professors and a grad student as major POV characters and each with special interests and needs. Below are just some of the resources I've turned to so that I can pretend myself into the mind of a poet living with MS; a professor passionate about Dante; a grad student incorporating dance and the tarot into her thesis and who gives birth twice in the course of the novel. Which reminds me, I still have to research surrogacy, embryo freezing, and midwifery. Since I'm creating this to collect my resources as much as anything else, I may have to update as I add resources.

Among the books I've been reading are:

>>Joseph Campbell's Masks of God, leaning heavily on V.1. Primitive Mythology
>>Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
>>Jamke Highwater's Language of Vision: Meditations on Myth and Metaphor which is organized around the Major Arcana of the tarot and gave me the idea to do the same for my story.
>>Dante's Divine Comedy--Since I have a copy in the Britannica Great Books set, I've been dipping in now and then to read a paragraph or three.
>>Also in the GB set is Aristotle's works and I've dipped into his Rhetoric and On Poetics. Something I expect a professor of Medieval Literature would know.

Always useful as a resource whenever music is involved or excerpts from documentaries might be helpful is YouTube. So when it occurred to me that Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Rite of Spring, might merit some kind of involvement in a story called Spring Fever, that is where I headed.

Vivaldi ~ Four Seasons

Joan Bunning's Learning the Tarot.
>>What is especially helpful with Bunning's site is the list of actions associated with each card. This is good for triggering ideas for the plot.

Emotional Toolbox. [Hat Tip Joely]

Info on living with MS

On Dante's life and works:

Dante at Wikipedia
>>but of course I've used Wikipedia for all the other topics as well.

Dante Alighieri on the Web

An Exhibition of Renaissance Dante editions.

There is a lot of Dante material at this Columbia University site but it is the collection of images they have that drew me there. It always feeds a writer's imagination to have images to look at.

Similarly, The World of Dante is a gold mine of info, texts and translations but their collection of maps is really extraordinary.

Here's a bit of fun: you can take a test to see where in Dante's Hell you will be sent.

The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to the First Level of Hell - Limbo!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	High
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	High
Level 2 (Lustful)	High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very Low
Level 7 (Violent)	Low
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Very Low

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test