Twelve books a year doesn’t trouble me anymore, but it did at the time. I found myself floundering beneath the burden of various competing obligations, some mandatory, some discretionary, and that reading, my oldest pastime, had fallen far by the wayside.
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
He’s right in more ways than one. The tools that reading has to offer are numerous.
In last week’s post, I wrote about my passion for writing and how, in reality, my devotion to it presents as rather obsessive and possibly a little pathetic.
I started 2018 off strong, with my previous Recent Reads post from January to March including four completed books.
(Well technically, three books and one novella, but one of those books was a reference for the next historical fiction novel I plan to write. Reading that required highlighting and note-taking that slowed me down considerably, and perhaps balances out the novella’s shorter length.)
Overall, I consider writing the most solitary of the arts. Not only does writing a novel involve spending months, if not longer, alone inside one’s head trying to reproduce the drama unfolding therein, the interim stages of an unfinished novel hold next to no interest.
This is something of a trend for me when it comes to my writing. I’m constantly overlooking my memorable achievements.
(What few memorable achievements I have as an unpublished, unconnected writer.)
TV sitcom Home Improvement characters Al (left) and Tim (right)
One post is nowhere near enough words to cover my insights on this process, which is still in progress.
One particular insight has taken me all the way back to the 1990s.
Painting by Tithi Luadthong
I’ve been answering these as part of my 10th writing birthday celebration back on February 12.
I do this in my dual roles of both writer and reader, the former to help my fellow writers try to generate book sales, and the latter because I just enjoy sharing my opinions about what I’m reading.
I do this because I’m a writer with aspirations of future publication and strong book sales.
I’m aware of how crucial reviews are to authors, both in helping produce those strong sales and in enabling one to (traditionally) publish subsequent books.
A Frame Around Infinity 