Three Months in the Library

I absolutely hate having all of my eggs in one basket, so one of my new year’s resolutions this year was to become less dependent on Amazon - to find other places to buy things. This has been difficult in two ways: first of all because the Kindle app is objectively pretty great and my self control in that arena isn’t; and secondly because it’s surprisingly hard to know where to buy Weird Stuff when you’ve not really been out and about for a few years. Where does one buy an electric blanket these days? Filofax diary inserts six months too early? Potting soil, when you live in the middle of a city and don’t have a car?

The problem with most of these things is not that they’re objectively difficult to find, just that it’s more time consuming, like buying your food from six different shops rather than going to the supermarket. In the last few years, I feel like I’ve mentally trained myself to dedicate less time to knowing where to find obscure yet necessary household goods. In that sense, trying to do without Amazon for a year is a lesson in noticing things - noticing what I need, noticing what’s around me, noticing how long things take. Occasionally I’ve found myself doing without a thing because it’s too complicated to research. But that’s not a bad thing, either. This year, I am calculating the maths of acquiring things differently, on purpose.

One brilliant thing has come out of this, though: at the end of January, I renewed my access to the public library for the first time in about a decade. But the future is now, and Libby exists, and in the last three months I’ve found some absolute gems that I would not have picked up otherwise. As of this morning, I’ve read fourteen books out of the public library since the end of January. Several I’d never heard of before I saw them (The Library of the Dead! The Housekeeper and the Professor!). Several I jumped on because I specifically had not been able to find them anywhere else (Djinn City! The Library at Mount Char!). My list of books I cannot find anywhere/cannot afford to buy in hardback still exists, but it’s a few books shorter than it was. My desperate-to-read-this-immediately list, on the other hand, has exploded.

The Dark Between the Trees is making its first tentative steps out into the world at the moment - I sent off my very last ever edit a week ago, and I’m reliably informed that the first of the eARCs have gone out. On one hand, that’s a couple of fairly sizeable milestones, so raise a glass to all those last dotted i’s and crossed t’s: it’s done! Over to the professionals now! But on the other hand, it’s pretty terrifying to me - that’s quite enough loss of control for one week, thank you very much!

I’m torn, sat here writing this, about how much detail I want to go into about that last sentence, and how it really feels. It is extremely exposing! There’s no way to say it without either minimising it or coming across as neurotic, so all I can tell you is that this week I feel very neurotic! I am more neurotic than anything else! I really hope this subsides soon, because at the moment the inside of my head feels like the sound a buzzsaw makes.

This too will pass, though, and I don’t expect it will take very long. That’s the trouble with trying to be more mindful about things and experience them as they happen: sometimes they involve a buzzsaw.