The End of August's Reading Week

I think the heat's throwing off my internal compass.

Usually, I have pretty good luck with randomly picking cheap and free Kindle books.  So much so that I've got something like four BILLION of the things on my devices, awaiting attention.  

It's book hoarding.  

It isn't pretty.

But seriously, I have a big queue, and since books are so plentiful (thank you, O Killers of the Gatekeepers!) and affordable now, I have a rule for myself with books these days:

A book has fifty pages to "hook" me, or it gets deleted.

I used to be a completionist, y'know.  That person who starts a book and must finish every word because it shall not beat me.  And most of the time, even novice authors get into the swing of things within fifty pages, so I don't do a whole lot of deleting, even with the rule.

People, this week about broke my head.


I'm a firm believer in promoting what you love instead of bashing what you hate, like it says up there.  So I'm not going to list out the more than a dozen books I started this week and gave up on.  All I'm going to say is that some of them were just boring.  Some of them were really trite (can we ban books that start with someone waking up to an alarm clock now?).  Some of them would have given a permanent eye-twitch to english teachers and editors universally.

I literally abandoned several of them before my fifty-page rule, because it was clear that the author did not understand even basic spell-check, much less how to tell a story.

More...than....a....dozen,  folks.

Imagine a sad head-shake here.  Because that was totally me, every time I moved a book to the trash folder.  If anyone follows me on Goodreads, they probably think I've lost my mind, since books showed up, were there for, like, an hour or something, and then disappeared without a trace.  (I don't bash individual books over there, either, most of the time.  Just delete them from my "currently reading" and forget they exist.)

So now, I'm moving back into writing week.

There probably won't be a lot of posts here this week, since I'm working on things that won't be ready for public consumption yet, if all goes well.

(Of course, if all does not go well, I'll be posting all the adventures that are distracting me from doing what I'm supposed to do.  I'm okay with that.  Posting is writing, too, right?  Right?!)

I'm chuffed to have the last/first writing week under my belt, too, since I know a lot more about how I write and what makes for the best writing days.  All of that stuff's pretty valuable in the grand scheme of things, really.  The fact that it's not found in any book or class, but only by my own experimentation, makes these weeks more important than I'd like to admit, too.

Onward and upward.

p.s. If you want to see the very few books that I actually finished, August's summary is right here.  It's a very short list.


No comments:

Post a Comment