Walking, Map-less, in Venice

I walk without looking at my map.

It's folded up in my pocket. Useless, because I can't find myself on it. The words are too tiny. The road I am on doesn't seem to exist. This church. This square. I can't find them on the page. It's okay. I've stopped caring about where I am, where I'm going.

Instead I look. I see.

It's possible that I am seeing for the first time.

Red dishtowels pasted against a blue sky. Ivy growing through window grates. A sign for cappuccino. The price is something I don't understand and I am too tired to calculate it.

Turn a corner and I am the only one walking down this alleyway. I look at my feet shuffling over 500 year-old cobblestones. Look up, at walls that Mozart might have trailed his fingers over on his way to conduct a concert. Up higher, a sky so blue it can't be real.

I can walk all day. Winding down passageways and over bridges. Admiring expensive clothing and glass and leather in store windows. Swirls of chocolates and pastries and bread.

This way leads across another bridge. This way, a dead end. A building. A locked door. Men selling masks and key chains. Statues. Ancient wells. The water shimmering in a canal.

A massive church rises up unexpectedly.

I move through a mass of people and I am one of them and somehow not one of them.

I don't know how I came to be in this place. I don't know where I am going next.

A split in the road, and I choose one of the paths with little thought because it doesn't matter which way I go. The truth is, I can't really get lost here. Even without a map. I've figured out that I can follow the signs painted on the sides of buildings, arrows pointing the way to the rail station. Or to the Rialto bridge. If you know these two places, you can trace your way to anywhere.

On a whim I stop to buy a gelato. I sit on an ancient wall and watch pigeons peck at the soggy roll that someone's dropped in the canal, at people taking selfies on a bridge. A burst of song from a roving acappella group. They sing faster and faster, the words in a language I don't know.

This gelato is the most delicious food I have ever tasted in my life. These pigeons are the cleverest birds I have ever seen. The people smiling at their phone screens are heart-breakingly beautiful.

This song, this song. How do I keep it inside me forever?

That Thing Where You Agree to Go To Prague Without Actually Realizing You've Agreed to Go to Prague

Last month I was out with a group of my writer friends and we were going around the table how we do, sharing stories of our latest writing projects, when one of the writers jokingly, I thought, mentioned that she needed a traveling companion for a trip to Prague, and I jokingly, I thought, said I'd love to be that companion, and then she jokingly, I thought, asked if I snored and I assured her that I did not, and we digressed for a moment about how annoying it is to share a room with someone who snores and we all laughed and moved on to another topic.

Side note: I've been a part of this group for three years, invited after my book came out by one of the women whom I'd met at a book festival. The members are all young adult fiction writers who live in the central Ohio area. We call ourselves OHYA (for Ohio YA authors). We're not a writing critique group (although we've all read each other's works) but more of a support group, meeting up for dinner once a month to pick each other's brains about writing and publishing, commiserating with each other when things are not going so well and celebrating when they are. 

For months now (maybe a year?) Lisa Klein's been giving us updates about her novel Ophelia (a brilliant and gorgeously written re-imagining of Hamlet from his girlfriend's point of view) being made into a film.  I know several writers whose books have been optioned for film and through their experience I've learned that it is a REALLY LONG AND DRAGGED OUT PROCESS and 99% of the time the film never actually gets made. 

I confess that this thought was what was going through my mind when Lisa Klein would share her monthly updates about the Ophelia film. The producer would tell her they'd settled on a script or they were toying around with casting or they were scouting locations and considering filming in Prague or whatever, and it all seemed very precarious and likely to fall apart at any moment...

until, a few weeks ago when Lisa Klein called me and asked if I was serious about being her travelling companion because as it turns out, her novel Ophelia is really and truly being made into a movie, and the producer invited her to come to the set in Prague, and seeing as how I do not snore, she would love for me to join her on this trip. 

Oh, also, she was planning to do some research on another book in Venice.

Flash forward to TWO DAYS FROM NOW and I am boarding a plane to Europe to catch a glimpse of Daisy Ridley dressed up as Ophelia and apparently Clive Owen is in this movie too? and also the guy who plays Malfoy in Harry Potter. 

So yeah. This is happening. 

I will keep you posted on the adventure.