I went to Italy in late October/early November and I remember the weather being fine--I know it rained a little the day we did Pompeii, but we also ate outside several days.

I thought Napoleon had the Grand Trianon redone.

Yep, I think he did. But the restoration still looks like lunchmeat.

I mean, it's a sickly glutinous pink.

Paris is much nicer. I could write a drabble or a sonnet or anything at all to Paris - I love it beyond sense or reason - but a whole lotta dam' fine writers have beaten me to it.

I feel the same way about New York, especially as I was raised in the countryside, and New York had this mythic glow in my mind. Being there did nothing to disturb the glow.

Being there did nothing to disturb the glow.

Well, NY is my anti-city (seven years there, school, and alas, me and the Big Apple Do Not Cohere), but I do understand the glow factor of a specific city. I had Paris as a child, with my grandmother in the summer for a few yuears, and loved it then. I fully expected that going back as an adult, the lustre would have worn off, but it didn't. The City of Light still kills me, on every level, in the best possible way.

Sept/Oct is a really good time to travel in Europe, I think. The summer tourist floods have begun to subside (although high season prices apply until the end of Sept) and the weather is generally nice.

I don't want to spend three weeks in the rain

You could go to Ireland in July & still have this problem. IJS.

OK, I'm skipping posts wholesale in an effort to catch up in all my threads now that I'm starting to feel like a functional human being again, so what's this newfangled LJ drabble thinggy and how does it work?

In other writerly news, I've decided to change the name of a major character in both the finished novel and the WIP, because I decided it was too much to have three important characters with the same first initial. Currently his name is Julius, and he has to have a Shakespearean name, as the brother of Hal, Portia, and Cordelia. It also needs to be a good name for a tall, blond, handsome, pompous, chauvinistic ass. So, I'm sitting here with my complete works of Shakespeare, and y'all get to help me pick a new name! My ideas are:

Ferdinand
Sebastian
Benedick
Demetrius
Bertram
Octavius
Titus

I'm kinda leaning toward Octavius. It's a very weird feeling, to contemplate doing a global find-and-replace on a major character, but I'd rather change his name than my other two J-men, since James and Jack are heroes and my two favorite characters in the entire books.

what's this newfangled LJ drabble thinggy and how does it work?

It's a non-fanfic drabble community. Doesn't necessarily have to be fiction; it can be prose, essay-ish, haiku -- just not fanfic. 100 words, or in the ballpark. I'll post the new challenge every Monday.

And you can join the LJ community here.

I like Demetrius.

me too.

I lean towards Titus, but mainly because I recently saw a production.