A couple of book type things

When I hibernate, I read.

I'm also still trying to have Reading Retreats every four weeks, where I'm tackling the pile of books here, but I have to admit something about those:

Free (or really cheap) ebooks seem to be cheap for a reason.

I've found some really great books that way, but for a while there, I seem to have been downloading anything with a decent-sounding synopsis without bothering to read the "look inside" bit first, which resulted in a pretty long string of things that weren't my cup of tea.

(That said, I also bought and downloaded, or just bought, in paper form a whole lot of books that should never have come home with me.  Call it an overexuberance of delight in having so much entertainment so readily available.)

ANYWAY, that said:

I've uncovered some kind of fun stuff in my reading-for-volume weeks that I haven't updated or shared about here yet.  So here are a few that I really liked:

Driving Sideways

Jess Riley

Get it HERE.

A young woman who's just received an organ transplant decides that the best way to celebrate life is by taking an epic road trip -- partially to find her mother, partially to go find the family of her organ donor, partially just to do something crazy for once.  Things go sideways from the first rest stop, and what follows is the epic story of an epic trip.  

Startup

Doree Shafrir

Get it HERE.

If you've ever worked in tech, known someone who works in tech, or silently watched the tech world with a fair bit of fascination -- this book will feel kind of eerily close to startup culture for you.  It's funny, well-written, and engaging, right up to the very end.  (The ending is a little abrupt, but given how good the rest of it is, I'd still give it 4.5 stars.)  Most of the male characters will make you want to stab them in the face eventually, but the female friendships/relationships are worth the whole story.

The Mermaid's Sister

Carrie Anne Noble

Get it HERE.

I went through this spate of downloading a whole bunch of fiction kindle unlimited books with an audiobook included.  This is one of the ones that I listened to, and it was really fabulous.  It's a fairy tale, but not tedious or one of those rewritten ones that's become almost omnipresent lately.  It's original, fun, and totally readable.  Told from the perspective of the sister of a girl who's turning into a mermaid in front of her very eyes (inexorably slowly, though), the race to uncover how to save the sister is told alongside her own story.  Definitely one of my favorites so far this year.

I also signed up for the Book of the Month mailings for the next three months.

I used to be wary of those things where you didn't have much control over what arrived, but after two shipments (of which Startup was the first), I've been impressed by what they've picked.  And now that I'm down to almost only kindle editions in my library (I've only got a few fiction books left in my physical stacks, thanks to the legendary simplicity kick I've been on...), it's kind of nice to read page after page of fiction on paper once in a while. 

It feels a little decadent even.  I like that. :)

What are you reading?  Suggestions?

Big Ol' Catch-Up Post

I'd be sad I didn't get more writing done, but there was this.

The Pacific Northwest in the autumn is amazing, y'all.  And while Wander Week didn't start until today, technically, I'm all about the spirit of the thing versus the letter of it.  My whole purpose for these weekly themed "retreats" is to try and give myself dedicated time to focus on one thing at a time, and to make sure I still have a breadth of exposure to the things I love doing.

And if I'd missed this, I'd have missed something I love.  I need more experiences (thus, the focus weeks), not fewer.  So this.  This, this, this.

I decided to head up the mountain one day on a whim, and ended up hiking by an insane drop-off into that river valley below, surrounded by giant Noble Firs and patches of wild carrot.  I sat on a log by the beach at Coldwater Lake and drew the path.  I logged an insane number of fitbit steps.  :D

I wandered.  I invoked the spirit of Walt Whitman and Thoreau (and probably a little Bill Bryson, because it is me we're talking about here), and gallivanted off into the wild.

I loved every minute of it, too.

I also read all of the writing-related books in the house, save a half-dozen that I put aside for next time.  The rest are being passed on to new homes, because the Giant Declutter is still A Thing(tm) around here.

So this week was Art Week.

I did a few things over the past couple weeks.  (A few things that have all but filled a sketchbook, which I'm calling a huge victory.)

*  I've been touristing in my hometown, practicing some things I read about in some urban sketching books.

*  I've been participating peripherally in #worldwatercolorday's monthly challenge, which was kind of summery-themed this month.  (Lots of seaside topics, which is totally cool with me...it just seems a little more July than September to me.) 

*  I even tried to make my own watercolor paint.  I already had the glycerine and gum arabic, and after remembering that eye shadow is essentially just pigment and binder, I crushed up a couple shadows and went for it.  And it worked!  Not the best saturation (while it's pigment, eye shadow is pretty diluted so it doesn't kill your eyes), and way more sparkle than I usually look for in a paint, but it totally worked.  I'm trying not to go insane and buy pigment to play with.  The struggle is real.

I also read through the last of the art books that I'm getting rid of.  (Which is all of them, save seven -- one on anatomy, one on botanical illustration, two on urban sketching, one on sacred geometry, one on keeping a nature journal, and the Laws Guide to Nature Drawing.)  The ones left over are foci for upcoming Art Weeks.  It's nice to have a focus and not feel so overwhelmed with the possibilities, I have to say.

Technically, wander week starts today.

I'm planning on going out today and drawing more things, if the weather holds.  (It's threatening to rain as I write this.)  My friend Laurie, of Glitterfoot Studios, is heading up to hang out and be all creative and junk together.

But most of this week is the final book push.  I've got a small stack of ecology-related/wander-y type things/transcendentalist lit still sitting here that my brain refuses to let go of until I've at least speed-read through them.  

(For the record, once that's done, I've got fiction left in the house, and a scarily small pile of nonfic that I still want to get to.  And I'm done.  I've completely cleared almost a dozen shelves, not including the art supply shelves.  Not even kidding.  It's crazy.)

And maybe -- just maybe -- I can get back onto a mountain somewhere before the snow flies, too.

ww: space to move

This is from the past few days, folks.

It doesn't include books I already dropped off at the Little Free Library, either.  And you can't see the second stack, behind this one, about half as high.

I've been reading books I started and didn't finish.  Or bought and intended to read, and didn't.  Or bought for some inexplicable reason (probably a recommendation from someone) and didn't click with.

In addition, there are four more stacks in different categories on my dining room table (I know, I know...temporary locations, blah blah blah, but it's working for me), and probably two full shelves with my rocks and rattles (mostly nonfiction spirit-y stuffs), and a shelf full of nature stuffs for the Kamana program I've been working on for two years now.  (Master Naturalist program.  It's pretty in-depth and resource-heavy.)

My shelves feel like they can breathe.  I feel like I can breathe.

It's not happening overnight, because I'm insisting on reading things I think are valuable to me.  And since I bought these books, most of them are things that I think are valuable to me.  Go figure. :)

I've also started in on the art supplies and clothes and extraneous stuff that just accumulates with the carnival of living, and I feel like I'm making decent progress, there, too.  Slow.  But decent.  I haven't given up to binge-watch Netflix and stuff my face with pie, so I'm calling that a win.

(Sidenote:  how did I end up with three dozen pink-ish nail polishes?  Is there a Polish Fairy I don't know about?)

As things start to go, I'm finding something important, too.

Stuff is energy.  

It sounds weird, but it's true.

Your stuff has energy.  Energy you put into it, either from your time, your money, or your desire to use/enjoy it.

And when you start shifting that energy around, you get some of it back.  Especially if you use it/pass it on rather than just trying to "organize" it.  

(I put that in quotes because if you're anything like me, "organizing" is just a game of Crap Tetris, where you're not really making it accessible or anything...you're just shoving it more efficiently into a non-accessible space, so getting it out is even more impossible without causing an avalanche.  Perhaps Crap Jenga is more apt.)

I knew, from past experiences, that if I have less, I do more.

I think I just understand now why that is:  I'm reclaiming energy, focus, and attention from the places I put it to store it for a while. 

Moving forward, I just want to be more judicious in my use of Energy Tupperware, I think.

Interestingly enough, Reading Week starts tomorrow.

I love it when one activity dovetails this nicely into the next.  Gives my week some Flow.

This week, I'm continuing the shovel-off.  It's shelf-clearing week.

That means I'm going for volume again this week instead of a particular theme, so to speak.  As per usual, I'll post a list of what got read at the end, and I might be a little quiet while I've got my nose to the papery grindstone.  

But I'll be reading.

And freeing up more space and time and energy in the process.

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.

Retreating

First, there was this.

I looked around my office, and realized the majority of things/activities/projects/stuff in my life falls into one of four categories (with some exception).

1. Reading (books, kindle, magazines, PDFs)
2. Writing (more books, lots of half-done outlines, research materials, letters)
3. Art (supplies, projects, books, UFOs, a ton of pens and journals)
4.  Wandering.  (adventure gear, MORE books, guides)

Earlier this year, I started looking at what I actually do, vs. what I want to do, and got rid of a bunch of stuff that was mostly aspirational.  (That process continues apace, as I find things I'm just not as into as I thought I might be.  Discernment: it's a gift.)

And I realized that I tend to hold onto things out of a preternatural fear of being bored.  (Because that'll ever happen, right?  I can't remember the last time I sat around thinking I'm bored.  Life's got too many possibilities for that to ever happen.)  I also tend to not do all the things I want to do out of some kind of fear that if I do THAT thing, I won't be doing THE OTHER thing.  Moreover, if I try to do THE OTHER thing, I feel guilt for not doing the first thing.

It's a self-perpetuating cycle of crazy, really.

So I decided to try something different.

(Who was it that said that the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?  That.)

I decided, kind of off-the-cuff, to do weeklong retreats.  A week of just reading.  A week of just writing.  A week of making all the art.  A week of adventuring.

A week seems like enough time to really dig into each category and to actually see some progress, without seeming like so much time that I'm abandoning the other categories.  I'm just focusing on one thing at a time for a longer period of time.  Doing activities in the category, varied enough to be interesting.

This first set of weeks are kind of exploratory, seeing how much I can do when I'm not worried I'm abandoning other things.  Trying to answer just how many books can I read in a week, or how many words can I write, or how many journal pages/canvases can I finish?  Because I've taken such a scattershot/follow-the-motivation approach so far, I don't really know yet.  They're valuable questions to ask.

This week has been my first reading week.

I didn't really theme it, though I plan to in later rounds.  (Fiction, non-fiction, just one topic, just one category, that kind of thing.)  I just grabbed a big stack of fiction off my shelves that I knew I only would want to read once before passing on.  (A Little Free Library opened near here, and I like feeding the shelves with books, since most of my fiction isn't suitable for buy-back at used bookstores, but are too good to just dump somewhere.)

I had 23 in my stack.  Ended up not staying completely on-stack (a few audio books, a few kindle books slipped in there, and I decimated my children's books collection to make room on the shelves, too), but found that it's probably realistic to assume a book a day is possible.  (If I finish the last two I'm reading now, I'll end the week with an even 20 read, but that includes a spate of kids' books that were literally only fifteen-minute reads.  I read all the time, finishing library books and kindle books I'd started and even a fair chunk of that stack up there.

While I've been tracking the titles on Goodreads and Facebook, I thought I'd make a quick record here, too, since this next week is a writing week and I'm probably going to end up spamming my blog with snippets and exercises and prompt-writing, just to keep it all in one place.  (Art week'll be pretty visual, too, I'm sure.)

If everything goes according to plan, I'll have six rounds of each category during the rest of 2016.

Granted, nothing ever really goes according to plan, and inevitably, something'll come up, because those somethings are real bastards when you have plans made.  But if I stick generally to the plan, I'll end 2016 with clearer shelves, lots of finished works, more than a few adventures, and a pretty big feeling of accomplishment.  I'm kind of excited about that, really.

Up there in the menu bar, I'm adding a category called RETREATS, which I'm going to try to use as indices for the weeks.  My booklists (even the cheezy, embarrassing stuff I read sometimes'll be there, because I'm not all that highbrow with my book choices sometimes....), writing posts, art posts, adventure stuff -- I'm going to try to keep them organized that way.  I'll link to sources and stuff whenever I can, and update that whenever I can.  (I'm lumping blog organization in with writing weeks, so it may get updated most often during those weeks.)

Let the experiment continue. :)