Week of: 8/1/26, & Summer Reading Update!

So it turns out that writing is a slow process.

I mean, I already knew that. But committing myself to regular updates here has the feeling to me of watching the status bar load. You get arbitrarily stuck on 35% for a long time for whatever reason, and then 72%, and don't even get me started on 99%. You'll be on 99% forever, and a watched status bar never loads.

But hey: I did in fact finish the draft of a story and submitted it this week! So, huzzah, lol. Of course, stories aren't ever actually "done." They're just, well, submitted... and sometimes sold, or so I've been told. But there's never a point, in anything I've ever written, where I've felt like, hey, I did it! It's over! Never a time I've read one of my stories and not made some tiny alteration, at least, or wished that I could do it over again, do it better.

Reading does offer that advantage: you do finally reach the last page. You do finally close the book with a sense of accomplishment. So I can report here that I've finished reading all ten of my chosen summer reading books! A month early, no less.

Or... I've "read" them, if audiobooks also count? Surely they must. Though I must report that the experience of reading a physical copy and listening to a book are markedly different for me. Just to clarify, I listened to Babel and Beloved, but read physical copies of all the others (which were: A Deadly Education, The Night Circus, Gwendy's Magic Feather, Middlemarch, The Prophet, Love and Video Games, Mother Night and Anna Karenina, though not necessarily in that order).

Of course, when you finish writing a story, you start writing the next. (At least, that's how I mean for it to happen -- starting tomorrow, lol.) And when you finish reading a book...

So, I'm already starting to think about my next reading project. Maybe starting next month for "Spooky Season"?? I've already plunged into another two novels, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Stephen King's Under the Dome, because I have no ability to allow myself to rest.