Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 169

And Then I Hit Fiction Part 2

This is part 2 of my task of pruning my fiction books. For part 1, please see last Thursday's post.
Going through my boxes of books was hard, really hard, but as the hours/days went on and I could see the boxes that were going versus the boxes that were staying, a funny thing happened. I started to feel lighter. I didn't have to own every book an author had ever written (unless she was one of my special authors). I didn't have to own every book in a series, whether it be by one author or a continuity series with many authors.
I could keep only the books I loved!
It was a good feeling and I started to be tougher on which titles I was holding on to. I also made a second pass through the Maybe Box and got rid of more. I also added more to the Keep Box, too, just so y'all don't think I suddenly went all Viking invader on my collection.
And then, on Day Four, I reached the shelves.
This was its own special problem. When I'd moved into my house six years ago, my To Be Read (TBR) pile and my keepers got jumbled together. It got worse when my mom put the books on the shelves for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful she did it because I was on deadline at that time, but she didn't know that Jayne Ann Krentz also wrote as Amanda Quick and Jayne Castle and Jayne Bently and she didn't know that I kept all these books together.
The bigger problem, though, was my mom didn't know which books I'd read and which ones I hadn't. I never crease a spine when I read—I'm anal like that—so they all looked brand new. This became a huge issue for me as I went through the bookcases. Did I not remember a book because it was forgettable? Or did I not remember it because it was part of my TBR pile?
You're thinking: Look at your spreadsheet, idiot. J That didn't help. Some books that were keepers, but that I'd read in the early days, had no rating attached to it. Was I parting with an old friend I'd merely forgotten and would regret losing? Or was I looking at a book I'd never read?
The new rule of thumb was to read the back cover. If I had no memory of it, and if it didn't sound like something I wanted to read now, it went. Nearly every historical romance I stumbled across was put into the Go Box. I used to read historical, but now I have zero interest in those titles. Books I knew I'd bought new and had never read also got put in the Go Box.
And ran across old favorites.
Usually, I remembered them as soon as I held them. The story would come back to me and I'd want to re-read it right there and then. I resisted.
I also rediscovered a few favorites. There was one I looked at and had no memory of the cover or that I'd ever read this author before—until I read the back cover. I didn't make it through the first paragraph before I was like OMG! I loved this book! How sad that it was lost amid the 5000 other books I owned.

The Origins of Keep Calm and Carry On

I think we've all seen the parody posters of Keep Calm and Carry On, but I never knew where it originated. After seeing this video, the poster and its words have new meaning. I can't imagine what it was like having to hide in bomb shelters, dealing with bombings and rubble and deaths. The parodies are still funny, but the original means more to me now.

Keep Calm and Carry On.

And Then I Hit Fiction Part 1

On Tuesday, I talked about culling books from my non-fiction collection. Today, I'll talk about my fiction library.
Since the day I started buying books, I've almost never gotten rid of one. I have a distinct memory of turning in some books at a Used Book Store (UBS) in the Twin Cities and turning around the next weekend and rebuying some of them. Yeah, I am an Obsessive Book Hoarder and topping 5000 books proved that.
There was no choice now, though. My employer is only paying to move 12,000 pounds and books are heavy. Since I need things like furniture and bedding, a deep cut was necessary.
I started with the boxes. I had 48 boxes of books and I figured if I didn't have the title on my shelf to re-read, it was a candidate to go. All the titles (more or less) are in a spreadsheet I have, so I worked with that open on the table in front of me. This wasn't too much help on the early boxes because I didn't start recording my thoughts on the books I'd read until later.
The rule of thumb here was if I read the book blurb and had no memory of the story, it wasn't a keeper. There was one problem with this method, though. I was tempted to read some of these books. They sounded interesting.
Other books surprised me with how dated they felt. The time travel books were particularly susceptible to this. What was fresh in its day, now seemed overdone. I kept a few special ones that I remembered fondly, but the rest went into the Go Box.
I make this sound simple, so cut and dried, but it wasn't. I'm emotionally attached to my books. This has lessened from its peak, but it was still an issue for me. A lot of titles went into the Maybe Box.
There were authors, too, that had written some books I really, really, really loved. When I read a book that hit for me on all levels, I would run out and start hunting those authors' backlists. I had to have every book they'd ever written. Not all of them were as awesome for me. I had to accept that I could keep the books I loved and get rid of the ones that didn't pass the threshold. The spreadsheet became handier when I started rating the books. In the early days, there were only number grades. 7 out of 10 was what I expected from an average book. Having a number grade made it easier because I was able to see what I thought of a book and get rid of it without reading the back cover. No temptation that way. :-)
Later, I began adding comments in addition to ratings. This was a double-edged sword. Like back cover copy, it tempted me to re-read the book I was looking at. Some of them anyway.
I didn't reach the shelves until the fourth day.

Obsessive Book Hoarder Prunes Non-Fiction Collection

One of the things I needed to do as part of my move from Minneapolis to Atlanta was go through my book collection and prune it. Considerably. I had over 5000 fiction books and I don't know how many research and reference books, so it was a big job.

I started with my office and the non-fiction. That wasn't bad because so many of the writing reference books were either for writers who were just beginning or were horribly out of date. Sometimes both.

What was interesting to me was how many books I pulled on the second pass through the shelves. I was certain I'd grabbed everything that could go the first time, but those were merely the easy ones. There were some books I didn't look at—I just knew I was keeping them. That was probably a wrong decision given how many I found that could go, but I love the edition of the AP Stylebook I bought in college and it's coming with me. :-)

There were some books I kept on pass one thinking they'd be helpful, but on pass two, I realized the internet made them unnecessary. Do I really need a History of the World book? One volume, no matter how thick, is hardly comprehensive and I can find the same overview information online easily.

This actually became one of my questions as I tested the worthiness of a reference book—would I go to the shelf and use it or would I just hop online and do a search? The titles that passed this test were generally topic specific and meatier sources of information. Maybe I could find this info online, but probably not as easily as in the book.

After I was done, I spent some time admiring the bookcase in my office. It looked so nice and organized. I even freed up enough shelf space that I didn't have to pile books two deep and could see what I had in one glance. It pains me to admit that I discovered references that would have come in handy if I'd only known I owned them.

Sound Barrier

For those of you who don't know, I work for a major US airline, so I'm more than a little geeky over airplanes. This is a short video that actually shows a plane breaking the sound barrier in front of a crowd. Pretty darn cool!

More Weirdness

The other thing that's weird about my brain is the things it finds interesting. I'm pretty sure in this case that other writers do the same thing, so it's writer weirdness rather than maybe just me weirdness.

A good example is the evening I flipped through channels and found the Discovery Channel was doing a show on container ships. Who has any interest in container ships? Not me, that's for sure, but I was looking to kill time so I figured I'd watch a few minutes, get bored and do something productive.

That didn't happen. Instead, I found myself riveted on the world of container ships and how they're loaded and unloaded.

This has happened to me too many times. I did research on nanotechnology years before I wrote The Power of Two because it caught my interest. Remember the atom smasher and the wormhole from The Troll Bridge? Yeah, that started when I was researching string theory for a story idea. From string theory, I went to M theory. M theory led to reading about particle accelerators which led to learning about the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, black holes, and worm holes.

I guess no knowledge is ever wasted because I never know when it's going to fold itself into a story somehow. The idea that I researched string theory for was an idea I shelved, but a year and a half later, I needed time travel and I didn't want to write a magic necklace story, so it came in handy.

In a way, it's kind of cool, you know? I know a little bit about stuff most people don't care about. On the other hand, it can also be frustrating because I know just a little and there are times I really need to know more. It's also kind of frustrating because of how much time it takes. It's like falling through my own personal wormhole because I can lose an entire weekend reading just one more thing about the topic of the day.

Unlike the unanswerable questions that I mentioned on Tuesday, this particular quirk doesn't really annoy me that much. I love learning and I'd be doing this kind of research even if I wasn't writing. Remember nanotechnology? Yeah, I read on that at a time when I wasn't writing.

Weirdness

I don't know if it's just me or if other writers have weird brains, but I can find myself asking the strangest questions for no particular reason other than curiosity. For example, since I've moved to Atlanta, I've noticed some things. Like there are a lot more rubber pieces from semi-truck tires all over the road down here than in Minnesota.

This is enough to get me to ponder the reasons. Is it because there are more trucks going through Atlanta than Minneapolis? Is it the difference in temperature? I don't think so because I was seeing this when it was 60 and 70 degrees and Minneapolis stays at that temperature or higher, too. Is it something in the roads in Georgia? Do the trucks passing through here have less maintenance work done on them than the trucks that go through Minneapolis?

Then there are all the cars I constantly see on the sides of the freeways here. In Minneapolis, it was maybe a few a week, but certainly not a few every single day. Which led me to run through a completely different set of questions.

Also, why do southern states have counties on the license plates while northern states do not? Why do northern states have front and back plates while many southern states have only the back plate? I can't conceive of any advantage to the one plate with county on it system, but certainly there must be, right?

I have no answers to any of these things, but my brain does this to me all the time. The smallest thing can send me spinning into a tornado of questions. At times, I try Googling some of these things because it would be nice to have answers and be able to put them out of my mind for good, but these aren't the kind of questions on which search engines can find relevant information.

The sad thing is that questions like this often pop into my head when I'm writing a scene, too, and again, the search engines fail me. I've tried emailing people who might have the answers, but with mixed results. This means my brain will spin back to the questions again and again.

Why do trucks lose more rubber in Georgia than Minneapolis???

Death Star Over Copenhagen

This is a commercial and it's hugely cool, especially if you're a Star Wars geek.

What's Time?

I've actually been thinking about time a lot lately and not in relation to writing a time travel book. I lived my entire life in Minnesota (the central time zone) until January when I moved to Atlanta (in the eastern time zone). To my surprise, this hour difference has impacted everything for me.

For one thing, I can't get anything done. In Minnesota, I would get home from work, do an online check-in to make sure nothing important was going on, I'd walk for 4 miles, go over to my parents' house to check on them (and cadge dinner since my dad is an awesome cook and I am not), and then get home in time to write before it was too late for me to think straight.

That doesn't happen here in Atlanta. I get home get through item 1 and 2 from my MN list and then it's like bedtime. Seriously. I don't know where the time goes. Then, when I do get to bed, I can't sleep because my body thinks it's too early. It thinks the same thing when the alarm goes off in the morning. I'm perpetually exhausted here and perpetually not getting anything done. At all. It's so frustrating.

To make it all worse, Daylight Savings Time hit and made it all worse.

I keep thinking I'll get used to it. After all, it's just an hour. But I'm still having trouble with it and it's been months. How much longer can it take? Will I ever get used to it?

I Love Condor Cam

I'm not sure how I heard about it--probably over Twitter--but I learned that the San Diego Zoo had a condor egg ready to hatch! For the first time, they were broadcasting the camera feed over the internet--Condor Cam! This was back at the beginning of March and the chick hatched on Saturday March 10th. As luck would have it, I saw the baby bird shortly after he (she?) emerged.

I've become addicted to condor cam. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me to take screenshots until 8 days after the chick's birth. I blame it on how tired and busy I've been. Because these are screen shots from Condor Cam, they're not as clear as I would like, but I'm going to share them anyway.

[image error] Condor Chick - 8 Days Old
[image error] Here's the condor chick with his mama - 11 Days Old
[image error] Condor Chick - 12 Days Old
[image error] Condor Chick tucked under his Mama's wing - 16 Days Old
[image error] Sleeping Condor Chick - 19 Days Old