Thing One: Thanks to my mom, who is a hero of the revolution, I got 300 of 400 pages revised yesterday. There’s as much work to do in the last hundred as there was in the first three hundred, but at least I’ve got all the groundwork laid. At the moment I’m even up by 2K, because I haven’t started any major deletions yet. That, however, is not going to last.
Thing Two: I’m tired. I have eleven hundred projects I’d like to work on, some of which are important, and a vague sense of desperation regarding how to manage it all. My mother, the other day, said, “There’s something wrong with my children. I don’t know where you got your ambition from. We told you you could do anything. We didn’t tell you you had to do everything.”
Deirdre and I both looked at her with incomprehension.
Thing Three: Also, I said equally vaguely, anybody know where I can get a dark blue cotton flannel (or denim) long-sleeved shirt and red-with-white-dots kerchief, a la Rosie the Riveter? Seems like the kinds of things I’d be able to find in a Salvation Army in the States but I’m dubious about locating them here…
Thing Four: I’ve been reading Dick Francis novels until my dreams have taken on a horseracing backdrop. The man knew how to tell stories. And I keep finding myself torn between buying an e-reader and, well, not, because I’d like to read more, but it’d be nice not to add to the bulk of materials in the house.
I think part of what’s keeping me (aside from the cost) is the vague fear (apparently it’s a vague morning) that Young Indiana will not understand Mommy is reading books if I’m reading them off a screen. This is patently absurd, because Young Indiana is going to grow up in a world where huge numbers of people read books off screens, so it’s hardly going to warp his little mind. But having grown up in an analog world myself, the fear lingers.
Thing Five, via Ellen Kushner/
I haven’t gone ereader yet. I read ebooks on my touch screen netvertible. It’s sort of best of both worlds. I can still do usual internet stuff and keep all my ebooks from different publishers and files also. Ebooks will suck you in once you start. The ease of DLing the next book when you’ve finished one in a series at 2am is scarily easy and hard to think of the $$ you are spending.
I still have certain authors I must have as Dead Tree version but it becomes less and less. You are still Dead Tree and audio.
As far as the kid reading. I hope you have better luck than I did. I read to my kid constantly when he was young. Waited breathlessly to share all my favorite children’s books. He HATES to read. It breaks my heart. How can a kid of mine HATE to read?