Got My Face In the Books

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I've got books out of three libraries on my sister's cards.  With my leaving date closing in (possibly next weekend) I'm frantically trying to get what I need/want out of as many of them as I can.

From the Longview library I've got a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.  Some of them I've been checking out every time I come to town for the last several years, some I grabbed off the new book shelves on my visit there a couple of weeks ago, some I found in catalog searches on certain themes and a few I last checked out when I still lived in Longview and are books not in our Rogue Valley System:

Shardik by Richard Adams
Solstice by Joyce Carol Oates
The Swan Maiden by Jules Watson
The Venetian's wife : a strangely sensual tale of a Renaissance explorer, a computer, and a metamorphosis / by Nick Bantock.
Reading on the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
Connectome by   Sebastian Seung
How to Fix Copyright by William Patry
Aladdin's lamp : how Greek science came to Europe through the Islamic world by Freely, John.
Banquet at Delmonico's : great minds, the Gilded Age, and the triumph of evolution in America  by Werth, Barry.
Q, the earliest Gospel : an introduction to the original stories and sayings of Jesus by Kloppenborg, John S., 1951-
White Protestant nation : the rise of the American conservative movement by Lichtman, Allan J.
Literature suppressed on religious grounds.
Literature suppressed on sexual grounds
Literature suppressed on political grounds
Literature suppressed on social grounds 

And there are four fiber art books not listed on crochet and embroidery and selling handcrafted items.

The books from the Vancouver WA county system all happen to be on the craft of writing or the writing life::

VAN  And so it goes : Kurt Vonnegut, a life   / Shields, Charles J., 1951-  
VAN   Revision : a creative approach to writing and rewriting fiction   / Kaplan, David Michael
VAN   The half-known world : on writing fiction   / Boswell, Robert, 1953-  
VAN  Description   / Wood, Monica  
VAN   Alone with all that could happen : rethinking conventional wisdom about the craft of fiction writing   / Jauss, David.

These last two I don't have in hand yet.  They are waiting for pickup but my sister may not be going north again in time so I may not get them at all. :(


VAN  Shouts and whispers : twenty-one writers speak about their writing and their faith
VAN   Proust and the squid : the story and science of the reading brain



And from the Lower Columbia Community College the theme seemed to be psychology and comparative mythology--both with the flavor of gender studies.  These are research for my FOS storyworld:


LCC Women, androgynes, and other mythical beasts by Doniger, Wendy.
LCC Boundaries of the Soul by June Singer
LCC  The power of love to transform our lives and our world / June Singer.
LCC  Twice upon a time : women writers and the history of the fairy tale by Elizabeth Wanning Harries
LCC  The implied spider : politics and theology in myth   by Doniger, Wendy


Turned out there is a limit of five books for non-students so I have to send two back before I can get these.  So am trying to finish with the two just above this weekend so I can trade them out.  At just 200 pages each they are the two shortest of the five my sister brought home.


LCC Androgyny : toward a new theory of sexuality / June Singer

LCC  The witch in history : early modern and twentieth-century representations / Diane Purkiss.  

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Weekend Linkup at Write On Edge

Weekend Linkup

I just discovered this and decided to jump in. The idea is for writers to share the link of a favorite post from their archives.  I shared Friday Forays in Fiction: Befriending Anger

And I think I'll leave it at that, encouraging anyone reading this to visit either the Weekend Linkup or my 'Befriending Anger' post as I don't have time for a substantial post tonight.  My sister and I got back from The Electric Bean (where we'd listened to the performers for Open Mic Night) at nearly midnight.  And I've still got to go boil a dozen eggs and peel them and mix up egg salad for tomorrow's lunch.  My sister is going to be away for the afternoon so serving Mom lunch is on me and I tend to get up groggy after 11am so I need to do this before I sleep so that all I need to do at noon tomorrow is slap the mix on bread and fix a tray.  Which means I need to do it before I get involved in anything that might make me forget I need to do it.  Like a long post.  Or finishing The Child Thief which I left off with probably less than fifty pages and in a really intense place.

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On Play - 7 Quotes & an LOLcat

Life must be lived as play.

Plato

In our play we reveal what kind of people we are.

Ovid

It is a happy talent to know how to play.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true object of all human life is play.

G. K. Chesterton

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

Heraclitus

Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.

Henri Matisse

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.

Carl Jung

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What Sound Does Joy Make?

What sound does Joy make falling in the dining room, banking off the bookcase and bringing along for the ride a piggy bank half full of pennies, several framed pictures and a sheaf of loose papers?

A thunderous clatter?  KERTHUMP JANGLE THUD

I confess I wasn't listening.

About 20 odd hours ago I fell, tripping over something I was trying to walk around then bumping into the dinning room table while off balance having my stocking feet slip out from under me like bowling pins hit by a strike ball.  I then bounced off the bookcase on my way to the floor letting fly the teacup I was bringing to the sink and landing with my left arm trapped against my ribs.

Nothing was broken.

Except my dignity.

I'm only now really starting to feel the aftermath in all my joints.  The worst is my neck which feels whiplashed.  Next loudest complainers are my shoulder sockets and the ligaments leading out of them in both directions.  After that would be my whole ribcage.  The rest is just a welter of minor twinges from toes to triceps.

In spite of having to move like a woman twice my age all day I got more productive things done today than in the whole week preceding.

The biggest task completed was formatting my external hard drive to prepare it for use as backup for my files.

Finally!!

The second biggest task was the backing up of my creative and research files.  There is still a long ways to go to get everything backed up but those are the most important irreplaceable files.

The third thing I accomplished was three hours READING an ebook that isn't a review copy but just for personal pleasure.  I list that as an accomplishment at par with the others because one of the realizations I had on Monday while wallowing in self-disgust was that I was spending time I could be reading downloading books that will likely sit unopened in my files for years.

For the last two days I've kept my browser closed most of the time.  Opening it only for specific tasks then opening only the tabs I need to complete that task and closing it again.  I'm giving myself this last chance to demonstrate some discipline before I impose the dedicated non-admin desktop on myself for writing.

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Blue Valentine

Why u so far way today?

With my sweetheart over 500 miles away on Valentine's Day today feels a little bit emptier than yesterday.

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Self-Disgust! A Suitable Sentiment.

 Oh I am so disgusted with myself.  I got nothing....NOT A SINGLE THING...I woke up intending to do done today.  And the same can be said for most of the days of the past week.

What did I do instead?  I chased links across the blogosphere.  I downloaded 115 free ebooks off amazon.com...after reading the blurbs and a review or two or three.  I daydreamed.

Well that last can almost be deemed productive since it was mostly about my storyworld.  But on the other hand I didn't get even close to opening a file to do more than daydream.

Also the blog surfing was mostly productive. Except for a few news and views posts I was following writing and publishing advice from writers who've been there, done that.  In some cases following their links off their bio on amazon.com.

But the bulk of the time was spent on amazon.  First going after free offerings form self-pub authors and then public domain books.  Following the endless chain of 'customers who bought this also bought'...

Between the Kindle and the calibre I've got at least thirty years worth of reading accumulated.  I'm probably not going to live that long.  My eyes definitely won't last that long.

What am I thinking?

I'm not.  Which is the problem.

Disgusted I am.  With myself I am.  And it ain't pretty.

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Sunday Serenity #270 - Kiss the Rain

Sometimes you just gotta learn to love what is.  If you live in the Pacific Northwest and hate on the rain you're just going to be unhappy 300 days out of every year.

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