august

Good evening, my friends.

Sorry. I know that sentence makes me sound like a 700 year old vampire Lothario with greasy hair and a dirty mustache. I just can't help it. We've been apart for so long, I'm a changed person. Oh, and I've developed a vaguely Eastern European accent which really helps with the wooing.

I've been doing some book buying recently, trying to make the best of working through the summer (long days = more money to spend on books = looooong days). Here are a few new ones sitting at the foot of my bed:

Nightshade by Andrea Cremer (YA Urban Fantasy)
The Girl Who Could Fly by Victoria Forester (MG Urban Fantasy)
French Food at Home by Laura Calder (a Cookbook!)
The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross (YA Steampunk)
Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares (Adult Fiction--I think?)

I'm super excited about Girl in the Steel Corset. I haven't seen a lot of new Young Adult Steampunk novels around the bookstore--but we have vampire books by the dozen. Do you have a favorite steampunk novel, or are you looking forward to a particular release? I loved Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare.

Also: is 'steampunk' the official terminology? I have this bizarre feeling that it's what my mom would call a "little boy word," like fart or bologna. Okay, maybe not in quite the same playing field.

Love and books (wonderful, wonderful books),

Erika

book anxiety

When I was cleaning my room, repainting and rearranging, I decided to do something really dumb: I separated my unread books from the ones I had read.

This book-segregation finally ended last night, when I took all my books off the shelves and ended up getting very little sleep. Thank goodness. I would look at my bookshelf and instead of thinking, hey, cool beans, maybe I can read something really good today, I would feel overwhelmed. My reading went from being an escape to a chore.

Does this ever happen to you? Working in a bookstore, I feel like I have to be reading constantly so I can give people up-to-date recommendations. Not only that, but my heaps-of-books-to-read anxiety actually made me not want to buy new books.

What

is

this

madness?!

Now that my books are happily intermingling again, I think I'm on my way to getting over my book anxiety. I might even have to buy a few more, you know, to fill out my collection.

You tell me: Do you ever get book-anxiety? And how do you deal with knowing that you aren't physically able to read everything out there that you want to read?

on not flying alone

Yesterday was the last night of a week-long writing camp I've been attending. It was put on by my local college and library and was been, well... affirming.

Every time I meet other writers in real life, I get this wonderful glowy feeling. It's like someone else finally gets it. Imagine if you had a burning passion for flying kites, and you're walking home one day when you see a flash of something colorful in the sky. You follow the thin line of string down to the earth and see a boy holding a spool, watching the kite dance in the wind. You spend the day discussing aerodynamics and the pros and cons of flashy ribbons and how much it sucks when you don't notice a nearby tree. And by the end of it the kite has flown off somewhere, but you're both smiling because you've shared your passion with someone else, and they understood.

This camp, and every other gathering of writers I've ever been to, has felt like that. A kite in the wind. A sign that you are not alone.

We did a lot of little exercises where one of our instructors, Jess, would give us a writing prompt and we'd spend ten or fifteen minutes writing, then people would share what they came up with. On my own, I rarely use prompts or write like that, in short bursts. They were great, though, and it felt so nice to write without forethought, without an outline or a story arc. Just to get the words down while they were still warm. A few of my favorite prompts were:

1. Write something involving a mirror or other reflective surface
2. If you had a key that could open one door (anywhere, anytime), what would be on the other side of it?
3. Write a brief autobiography, and include one lie
4. Write about yourself, the writer, from the point of view of someone else (your friend, your laptop, the flies on the wall, etc)
5. Write a song lyric/nursery rhyme/poem you know by heart, then respond to it line by line