I thought it might be cool, every now and again, to post a list taken from my book inventory. I went to Random.org, a random integer generator, and generated two sets of random numbers. One was the number of books I was going list, something between 1 and 20; the other was a list corresponding with the line number in my book inventory spreadsheet. Today, I’m posting 7 books.

• Way Out West by Blanche Marriott (Not yet read)
• To Wed a Stranger by Edith Layton (one of my keepers; her death still makes me sad).
• Blame It On Cupid by Jennifer Greene (Not yet read)
• Quotidian Mysteries by Kathleen Norris (I love Kathleen Norris)
• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein (a classic)
• The Superior Person’s Second Book of Words by Peter  Bowler (Not yet read)
• The Age of Voltaire by Will and Ariel Durant (I haven’t read everything, just dipped in from time to time)

Out of 1,293 books in my inventory, 533 are unread. It’s almost certainly a matter of time, mood and memory, as in remembering I have a given book, not aligning. I wonder how many of them I’ll read this year.

Hmmm… Maybe I should throw down the gauntlet to myself, and commit to reading at least 25 of my unread books in 2010.

I went to the library today, fully intending to pick up the items I had on hold and then leave, leave without borrowing anything else, because I already have plenty of books to read.

You know what they say about best-laid plans? Yeah, that applies here.

The library’s great because it allows me to take risks, to borrow things I’m not sure of. The downside is the due dates; they pressure me. The dates on the new things are particularly demanding; I know I’m not going to renew, say, Her Fearful Symmetry, and I don’t think I’ll be able to read it before it’s due. And that’s just one example. The pressure to get those books read feeds my reading itchies; I can’t settle down to read Book A because I know I need to get Book B read. Maybe I need to start thinking of the borrowed books as possibilties, not obligations, as things I borrowed because I wanted to read them, not as things I have to read. Maybe I’ll be able to read more.

I should be able to read a lot next week — I’m on vacation. I usually take the week before Christmas off so I can get some shopping done. This year, I finished early, so the week is all mine. I should be able to get a good bit of writing done, too, but I’m really looking forward to wallowing with books. Even the thought of it seems blissful.

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In other news, starting tomorrow, I’m posting on Wednesdays at the Moody Muses. I’ve been a fan of the Muses for ages, so I was hugely flattered to be asked to contribute. I’ll be posting reminders here, as time goes by; I hope you’ll visit (if you aren’t already).

I read about a quarter of Sir Martin Gilbert’s The First World War before something very like boredom stopped me in my tracks. It’s certainly not Gilbert’s writing — he manages to wrangle a great deal of information into clarity without entirely sacrificing its complexity. The problem is the thing that made that particular war so awful: It was the same stuff, different day, for years. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, WWI is insanity in action. But reading the same stuff done over and over again is…boring.

I also think I quit reading because the pointless, criminal waste of all that life makes me sad.

And now I don’t know what I’m going to read. I have a bad case of the reading itchies.

I”m not sure where I’ve been. I’ve been somewhere, but where is a mystery. I haven’t been writing very much — 300 words is an amazingly good day — and I haven’t been reading much, or at least so it seems.

I think the idea that I’m not reading is driven by the fact that I’m returning so many library books unfinished. I start them, read for an hour, think, “Inh,” and put it in the bag to go back. Some of these books I reserved weeks, or even months, ago. It’s disappointing and disheartening to return them unread, after all that waiting and patience.

And it’s not the books. They’re good books. They’re just not what I want.

I think I ought to want them, since many of them get such excellent reviews (which is what makes me reserve them in the first place). I wonder what’s wrong with me that I don’t want to read demanding fiction. I beat myself up for my lowbrow tastes. (I beat myself up about everything; I’ve come to the conclusion that part of my psyche goes looking for reasons to beat me up, and it doesn’t actually matter what it is. I’m working on ignoring it.)

Then, today, I understood. I don’t want to get involved. I don’t want to read something that’s going to draw on a particular kind of emotional and mental energy. New-to-me fiction pulls from that exact energy source, and that’s why I’ve been resisting it .

I use that energy for my own writing, so I don’t see an end to this resistance any time soon. I suspect there’s a lot of non-fiction, and a lot of re-reading in my future.

Today, I realized that part of the reason I haven’t been writing like a mad, possessed thing is that I’m not a mad, possessed thing when it comes to my writing — or anything else in my life. I’m in a place where everything is pretty much in balance — family, friends, diet, exercise, creativity — and it’s throwing me a little bit. Being able to spend time and energy on everything means I don’t give all my time and energy to any one thing — and it means I’m not as productive when it comes to some things as I have been in the past.

When I realized that, I had a moment where I considered throwing things out of balance again, giving more time and energy to writing, for example. I was tempted — I would really like to feel as if I were being productive and making more progress — but then I considered the cost in dissatisfaction with the rest of my life and decided it’s not worth it.

Through one thing and another, the writing is going very slowly. I think one of the things is my desire to write more quickly. I think I’m afraid that if I don’t finish it really soon, it’ll become yet another abandoned project. That, or there’s a window of opportunity for it that will be open next May 14th, and if I don’t have the book finished by then, my only hope for it to find readers will vanish, poof!

Yes, I know that’s totally irrational. I’m an irrational person. I can be sensible and all that when I need to be, but at heart, I’m irrational. And I’m okay with that, unless my irrationality starts to wind me in a bunch. Like now.

::sigh::

This is the kind of thing that makes writing hard for me, more, I think, than struggling with the technical stuff.

Or at least that’s my story tonight.

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I’m reading Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division, by Ian Curtis’s widow, Deborah Curtis. I’d say I’m about halfway through and right now, I’m disliking Ian Curtis enough that it might put me off his music. And it’s not that Deborah Curtis attempts to blacken him — the things he does and says that annoy me are presented in a matter-of-fact, “this is what happened,” way. She’s reporting, more or less.

The thing I probably need to remember is that in the story being told, he’s only in his late teens/early 20s. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t admit they behaved stupidly, one way or another, when they were that young. Since Ian Curtis died before he got out of his early 20s, it’s impossible to say what he would have been like, whether or not he would have grown up and out of this particular kind of stupid behavior.

But still…

The KaBraiMo portion of November has been most fruitful. I’ve found a new direction for the story, which I love. I got goosebumps when I figured it out, which has never happened to me (that I can recall) in my entire writing life. That’s the really good part.

The need-to-look-at-it-in-the-right-way part is that in the last week, I’ve cut 14k out of the manuscript. On the one hand, that could make me very depressed. It feels like I’m never going to finish this book, and this kind of thing doesn’t help. But I can’t look at it that way. I have to recognize that all the cutting I did was necessary, and inevitable, given the change in the story’s direction. Whether I cut those words today or in six months, they’re still getting cut. So why not grasp the nettle and get it over and done with?

The upside to doing this now, is that I don’t have the scenes I cut in my head any more. Actually removing them from the manuscript removed them from my imagination, from my mental image of the story. That alone makes all that chopping worthwhile.

And now it’s just a matter of replacing them.

::sigh::

I can’t stop thinking about Control. I’m not sure why. I think it has to do with the movie’s intense inwardness — it’s a demonstration of “show, don’t tell” in the way it simply observes Ian Curtis in the last four years of his life. There’s no sense that the filmmaker, Anton Corbijn, has an axe to grind; there’s nothing in the script, direction or performances that says, “Here’s what you’re supposed to think about this.”

I’m not sure I can write with that kind of detachment, but I’m fairly certain I shouldn’t try. My thing is to write how something feels, how it seems to my character. Because of that, when I’m in that character’s head, I’m a partisan. I’ve taken that character’s side. The hard part is that I’m also aware of what other characters think and feel, but I still have to write the scene from the POV character’s side.

But I still think I can take something from the movie. I think I can borrow its confidence in its quiet. It’s willing to be still and low-key, resisting any impulse to reach out and grab the viewer by the lapels. It’s willing to risk loss of attention, because it trusts that it’s audience won’t lose interest. That trust in my audience is the lesson this movie can teach me.

Earlier today, I watched Control, the movie about Ian Curtis of Joy Division. Excellent movie, with a rightfully praised performance by Sam Riley. The thing that impressed me most is the subtlety of his transformation into someone whose profound unhappiness led him to commit suicide at the age of 23.

Curtis killed himself before I became aware of Joy Division, but I was a fan of New Order, the name that band took as they continued in the wake of Curtis’s death. The thing is, I love, love, love, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, Joy Division’s biggest single. I didn’t know, though, that it was Joy Division — or maybe that knowledge just never stuck.

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I have an author to add to New To Me: Emily Arsenault for her debut, The Broken Teaglass. Publisher’s Weekly put it better than I can: “In Emily Arsenault’s quirky, arresting debut, two young lexicographers find clues to an old murder case hidden in the files at their dictionary company…The result is an absorbing, offbeat mystery–meets–coming-of-age novel that’s as sweet as it is suspenseful.”

One of the things I particularly liked about the book is that it demonstrates the importance of context. Quotes that seem to mean one thing, to have one tone, have a different meaning, a different tone in a different context.

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Things have been difficult on the writing front. I came closer than I have before to quitting Dragonfly — I was convinced its problems were insurmountable, or at least would mean cutting roughly 25% of the existing work. That made me sad, made me feel as if the wretched thing will never be finished.

Fortunately, before I got out my machete, I got to the heart of the real problem…and figured out the real solution. Whew! So now it’s just a matter of implementing it…

I never get sick. Well, not seriously and not for long. It’s actually kind of freakish. I also never get fevers — I can count on the fingers of one hand the fevers I’ve had since childhood, and that includes the two times I had appendicitis.

I got sick this week. Not seriously — it was a very mild case of flu. But it was enough to make concentration impossible and it kept me out of work (though that was more about not infecting anyone else than about being too ill to work). So I’ve barely been writing, and I haven’t been thinking, and I’ve been reading people I’ve already read.

For years, I was somewhat against the BICHOK school of writing, the one that says that some part of every day must be spent with Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard. I was a bursty writer, one who would think and think and then write in a giant burst of at least a thousand words.

But things have changed in the last year. I’ve spent a lot of it writing at least 100 words a day, almost every day of the week, and if I didn’t write 100 words of new narrative, I spent at least five minutes of active planning and brainstorming on paper (because you can plan in your head forever; writing it down is serious business). Being sick enough that I couldn’t focus derailed me, and I’m finding it a little tough to get back on track. I’ve reached the limits of brainstorming, for now at least; now it’s time to get back to writing.