Writer. Contributing Editor at The Discarded Image. Digital Content Strategist. Here's where I publicly explore the books I'm reading, the projects I'm working on, and other current interests. after busy work, work
I’m back to writing again after a long week of busy work. A lot of that involved sorting, purging, and repacking books and other items that Brandon and I brought back from our long-distance storage unit the weekend before last. It seems no matter how many times we go through stuff and get rid of quantities of it, every time we move we discover more things we can live without! So at this point, books make up the bulk of our stuff (literally; the pile of book boxes occupies greater square footage than our furniture). As I was rubbing my back last week and considering how to divest myself of “unnecessary†books (is there such a thing?), Brandon said pointedly, “Yes, we’re nomads for the time being, but instead of livestock we travel with our library. It’s what makes us us.†I wish us had some camels to schlep around all those crates of hardcovers.
The other busy work was related to History Lives. Though I’m now a five-book veteran, I still haven’t acclimated to the anti-climatic book production cycle. After those sleepless final weeks of pouring paragraphs onto paper, you email the file to your editor, ready for the world to celebrate the birth of your brainchild. Instead, a few weeks later, you start getting questions about this point of research or that phrasing, to which you dutifully respond by looking up facts, justifying your choices, clarifying, and making compromises. Then you get excited again when the preliminary cover design appears in your inbox, and you’re soon caught up in suggesting revisions (in this case, for historical accuracy only—the art itself is wonderful, as lively as the other volumes and full of great details; I’ll post the image once it’s final). And then the maps arrive, requiring numerous small but significant corrections (“your drawing of Pearl Harbor is lovely, but, er, it should be located a wee bit more to the west than Texasâ€). Now all that is done, but I still have the proofs to look forward to. Honestly, by the time my comp copies of the final thing arrive, I don’t have it in me to read through it again!
Still, I’m not going to quit writing any sooner than I’m going to quit traveling with my library, camels or no.
And as I get back into the writing groove this week, I also need to get back in the reading groove. I’ve fallen off the wagon just a tad. In a previous post, I mentioned how I decided to do all the reading for a summer course my husband taught on Medieval and Reformation Spiritualities. It’s taken a lot longer than I imagined, partly because of other summer activities (see above!) and partly because I keep picking up other books (I’m currently halfway through both Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain and Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees). But I have now finished The Story of Christian Spirituality: Two thousand years from East to West and will eventually post a few comments about it. (My comments about The Rule of St. Benedict are already out there.) I still have several other titles to go—and today, the stack of texts for all his fall courses arrived, and wouldn’t you know it, but several of those have already snagged my attention, too! Living with a history professor is putting a strain on the old TBR list.
Anyway, so far my back-to-literary-work week is off to a good start. I have some new reviews to post over the next few days. And I’d love to know what you are reading. Just now getting to your summer stack? Already getting ahead on fall textbooks? Caught up on your reading challenges? Do tell.
