Two Months

Wow, my non-activity reaches a new record.

Let's see, updating on things talked about last time:

NaNoWriMo is obviously over by now. It was a lot of fun, and the first time I've ever been able to actually reach The End of a writing project! For that reason alone I may be taking advantage of the offer for winners ("winner" meaning writing 50K words or more) to get a free proof copy of my novel. To have something I wrote as an actual book would be incredibly cool, though I'm not sure if I can stand to put something so obviously imperfect into such a final form. The offer is good through June, so I have time to do some editing. Not sure if I'd be able to get it to the point where I'm satisfied, though. We'll see.

Still working at Borders. Despite feeling really burned out the week before Christmas, when I was scheduled 6 days in a row during the craziest time of year, it's been a lot of fun. Feels good to be getting out of the house and doing something worthwhile, and most everyone I work with is great. It's still up in the air whether or not they can keep me past seasonal help, but I should know that in the next week or two.

Aside from working, mostly what's been filling my time is reading. Working at a bookstore hasn't really affected that much; I have a feeling this is what I'd be doing with my time regardless. Almost a year ago I discovered the site GoodReads.com which has really influenced my addiction. It was tough trying to remember everything I've read before so I could add it to my list -- of course, being a perfectionist, I couldn't stand the idea of it being incomplete -- and, even so, it's not quite accurate. But, accurate enough, according to the rules I gave myself. My list includes everything that I've read for pleasure, on my own, in my "adult" years. Books read for school are not included (I never actually read half of them anyway), and books I read as a child are not included (I'd never be able to remember them all). Whether I didn't have time, or school just beat the desire out of me, I really didn't read much -- if anything -- on my own from about the ages of 12 to 21, so picking up Wicked part-way through college seems as decent a starting point as I could hope to get. At any rate, I'm pretty sure I've remembered everything (all fiction anyway, I don't read enough non-fiction to fret over it), and gotten the dates roughly correct.

Obsessive compulsive tendencies taken care of, it was great to start keeping track of what I'm reading now . . . and trust me, I'm getting use out of it. I haven't read this much since I was a child, and it still seems that no matter how many books I read, my "to-read" list just keeps getting longer. To try to help that, I've joined a group on that site with the challenge to read 75 books in a year.

According to my GR bookshelf, I read 44 books in 2009. So it may seem that 75 is an overly ambitious goal, especially considering that I was unemployed for most of the year and hopefully that will not be the case this year. However, I also spent a lot of time re-reading books I'd already read before, plus the fact that I really didn't start getting into reading again until April. So it should be doable. At least, one book every 4 or 5 days is doable. Keeping up that pace for an entire year . . . that's where it gets tricky. Especially when I'd really prefer to only count new books for this challenge, and there are still quite a few I'd like to re-read as well (part of that perfectionist thing again, I hate the fact that I'm really just guessing on several of my 1- to 5-star ratings on this site). But we'll see. Whether I actually reach it or not, it's nice to have a goal.