I’ve been wandering around lately, looking blank and struggling to have simple conversations with people. I don’t have Alzheimers, at least not yet, but I am deeply immersed in writing.

In the past few weeks work on my shepherdess novel, Jessamyn, has taken off. I have a word counter, and it says that, on the days I actually wrote in August, I averaged 500 words. If I had actually written 500 words for every day in August that would have been fifteen thousand — 15000 — words. The total is — less. But it is a great improvement over zero which is where the book has been for years, or 42 words which was July. Or worst of all, -31. Negative thirty-one! That’s June. I deleted something. 

It’s different than writing about Dante because I am constructing this world bit by bit, or deconstructing it, when I realize that I made a mistake. ~*~ If you, little shepherd, want all your lambs to be born in the spring, you have to keep the rams separate from the ewes until August. They cannot be romping around together in May. They must have separate pastures! ~*~ Since several scenes in the beginning of the book involve wandering through said pastures, I have to go back and fix those descriptions, mostly by adding gates that people then have to open and close. On the positive side, when I redid the pastures in my mind, I realized that I could explain some early villainous behavior. 

This world construction has a peculiar effect on my dreams. When I drift awake at 2 a.m., and my dreams can still be thought about, this book world is tangled up in them. However, it is also mixed up with whatever else I have been reading. Recently, that was a fantasy world with talking animals. Interesting dream! Fortunately for anyone reading this, gone, like all dreams. I remember the tangle but not the details. 

It also means that everything I read, that’s not fiction, might be grist for my mill. I have Saint Waltruda in the book and when I read about the Abbey of Saint Walburga in Colorado (https://walburga.org) I was confused at first. Did I have the name wrong? And her feast day as well? I was interested because I noticed that Saint Walburga was a patron saint for storms, and that would be an easy add.  

Well, they are two entirely different women with some interesting similarities. Both came from families with saints before and after them. The saints in Waltruda’s family are not familiar to me, but Saint Walburga was the niece of Saint Boniface. My previous pastor gave a sermon about Saint Boniface about once a year. He was one of the first missionaries to Germany and, according to Father Saunders, responsible for Christmas trees. After Saint Boniface had converted a lot of people he sent for his niece, Walburga, who had been living in an English monastery. She went to Germany and became the head of a monastery there.  

Waltruda was also in a monastery, but in Belgium. She lived about 100 years earlier than Walburga. Both of them have large, beautiful churches commemorating their lives in the places where they headed abbeys. This is Saint Waltruda’s reliquary in Mons, Belgium. (Wikimedia commons)

Saint Waltruda was married and had children, before she became a nun. Hence the detail in the middle of the reliquary. Some of her offspring are also saints.

Rabbit Hole: There is a picture of a church in England dedicated to Saint Walburga on Wikipedia. It is really beautiful and the story is fascinating, even if it is Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_St_Walburge,_Preston

The photographer who did the interior pictures has more pictures of all sorts here.   https://michaeldbeckwith.com/ They are public domain and beautiful.

** Father used to say, “Writing, writing, writing like Napoleon.” I have no idea what it means.