My Blue Castle

note: I’ve done a little re-decorating around the olde journal this morning. Aside from being the kind of person who rearranges the furniture on a pretty regular basis, I am trying to mesh up my on-line presence into some kind of coherency. But no matter. I re-painted, and hung some new wallpaper. I’m still tweaking the knick-knacks.

I often daydream about what would happen if some magical creature came to me and said …

Dear Joy, If I was to give you a year in which you could do anything you wanted … what would you want to do.

Well, there are a million answers, but having done up ye old manse here today, I come back to one of my favorite “what ifs” and that is --  I would like to take a year, and see if I could write a screenplay version of my favorite book “The Blue Castle” by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

It could be beautiful … all deep dark Canadian woods, and gingerbready Victorian era towns, twenties fashions …

The book tells the tale of Valancy, oppressed by the expectations of her family, who upon learning some tragic news, decides that from that point on, she’s living only to please herself. She gets herself a job looking after a girl who is being shunned by the ‘upstanding’ community for being an unwed mother. While there she meets Barney who is intriguing to her, and after her job ends, she asks him to marry her … out of nothing but a desire to give her a reason not to return home. And so he does, and he takes her off to his little house on an island in the middle of the woods, and this being a romantic tale, romance ensues. Also various things are found out about Barney’s background that make things all right in the end with the community at large, although Valancy’s not entirely sure it’s good news.

So yeah, there a lot of fluff, but always with a bit of an edge, and a good message about staying true to yourself.

And cinematically I can see it all in my head. There would have to be some hard decisions about the structure of the story to keep things moving, but it could be beautiful, all blues and greens, and moonlight and spangles. Lovely lilac sunsets on dappled lakes… snowy woods with splashes of red and green.

So that’s my daydream, this fine morning… a daydream I love…

p.s. -- if you are intrigued, the book is actually online here http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200951.txt