My TBR bookcase.
In the absence of a regular paycheck, I’ve started paying closer attention to my budget, and it has reminded me that everyone has financial blind spots. It’s easy for me to see that my husband spends too much money on technical gear. But when it comes to buying books, the money I spend never gets subtracted from my mental balance sheet.
The worst part is that I already have an entire bookcase of unread books in my house, as well as a long list of library holds. The Japanese concept of tsundoku has been getting a lot of attention lately, and I may be the poster child. But I don’t buy books for the emotional gratitude of owning them – at least, I don’t only buy books for that reason. I really do intend to read them, and I do work my way through the piles. It’s just that there is no hope of my ever reading them faster than I bring them into the house. I get two to three unsolicited ARCs in the mail each week, and these alone account for more reading than I could possibly do in a lifetime.
So, in the interest of shining a light on my own blindness, and to give a little love to my impulsive purchases that may never get read, here is a summary of my October book purchases. Read More
My computer is littered with false starts. Somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 words of fiction, I run out of steam, run out of ideas, fall into a plot hole, and don’t know how to continue. So my stories sit, unfinished and abandoned in a folder on my laptop. Last Friday I made it all the way to 16,000 words before I realized I had no idea where I was going. I closed my laptop in disappointment and that night I went to bed a failure.