My Books

Weird Weather

Secret of the Haunted Hotel comes out tomorrow, and you should also be able to order the paperback. It will eventually be in online stores beyond Amazon, but I don’t know if that listing has propagated yet.

I’ve realized that this is the second book in the series that involves Lexie being stranded by weather, but that really is a thing that happens in the part of the world where the series is set. In this book, it’s also part of that kind of story. There’s no story if the cops can get there right away or if people can leave. They have to be isolated in the creepy country house while knowing that one of them is a murderer.

Just as the ice storm in Interview with a Dead Editor was inspired by multiple situations I’ve experienced, the storm in this book was inspired by a specific event.

A few years ago, there was an outdoor event at a venue not too far from where I’ve set the fictional town in this series. It had been a wet fall, so all the creeks, rivers, and lakes were already high and the ground was saturated. Then a system hit us and seemed to just sit there. The rain wasn’t that heavy, but it was constant. The outdoor event wouldn’t have been all that bad, though, except that a nearby creek had overflowed, and it sent a sheet of water down a hill, so that the entire event site essentially became a flood plain, with water ankle-deep. The water was flowing to another creek down the hill from there, and the road leading to the venue crossed that creek. It was so deep under water at that point that you couldn’t even see where the bridge was. That meant there was only one road leading out of the site. Fortunately, it was the way I would have been heading, anyway, but most of the side roads were closed. I would not have wanted to be driving out there after dark because all of a sudden, the road would be a creek. There were a few spots where the water was coming down a hill and across the road. You could still see the road because it wasn’t that deep, but it was a few inches deep all over the road. At night, you wouldn’t have been able to tell where the road was.

Even though things were bad and getting worse, there was also a tornado warning, so I didn’t want to get on the road. They herded everyone into one of the indoor facilities at that place until the danger passed. Eventually, the rain eased up, but everything was still under water. Eventually, I was able to drive home, and I was totally drenched and covered in mud.

In that part of the state, there are often flash floods where they have to get people out with helicopters, and there are high-water rescue teams for when the roads flood and people get stranded in their vehicles. So, I’m not stretching things to have a couple of severe weather events in the same area within a short time frame. It’s a hilly area with a lot of creeks and a few rivers, so you get flash floods. I did restrain myself and didn’t include the tornado. I think I’ll save that for another book. I also left out the drastic weather change that followed that system. The next day, it was sunny and muggy, though the ground was still soaked and there was standing water. By the time I got home after the event, another front was coming through, and it dropped something like 20 degrees. It was just starting to get chilly when I got home, and then it got downright cold.

Basically, if you like having weather affect your plot, Texas is a good place to set your book.

Metaphorical Cleaning

My house cleaning and office organization project continues. So far, I’ve got the downstairs except for the kitchen cleaned (the kitchen is going to take extra time, not so much because it’s dirty but because there’s more to do, like wiping down the inside and outside of appliances, cleaning the oven, etc.) and I’ve organized the area under my desk.

My desk is deep and doesn’t have built-in drawers. It’s basically an L-shaped table with a keyboard drawer, and that means there’s room under it for storage. I’ve got a stack of plastic drawers on one end. Under the corner is a unit with a big drawer/bin and a shelf, and then I have the printer cart from a previous desk, from back in the day when you would put your tractor feed printer on top and your paper below, and you’d feed the paper up through a slot to the printer. That cart is now where I keep my printing supplies. I sorted through all that stuff, so now I can easily find the printer paper, writing paper, and all the various kinds of stationery I’ve amassed, including notecards and postcards that can be run through a printer. I also organized and sorted through all the notebooks that go on the shelf of the corner unit. The area looks so nice now that I find myself just gazing at it.

Then I made a big change on the top of my desk. My desk is a bit tall for me. I put my laptop on the keyboard drawer and it’s more or less at the right height if I keep my chair high enough, which means I need a footrest. But I was feeling really hemmed in by the desk and was pondering if I needed to get something different. Then it occurred to me that the problem was really that one of my printers, the inkjet that’s also a scanner and copier, was sitting right in front of me on the desk, making the desk look even higher and blocking part of my view out the window. I’d put it there because when I was using my office previously it was before I got Wi-Fi, so I had to be able to plug the printer directly into the computer. Now it doesn’t matter where the printer is, so I moved it to that cart behind my desk.

And it was amazing the difference it made. It cleared a lot of space on my desk and opens that whole area up. I have a clearer view and feel a lot less “trapped.”

I think there’s a metaphor in there. I was feeling trapped by something that had served a purpose at one point in my life. Things had changed so that it no longer needed to be where it was, but I hadn’t realized that or thought about it until I looked at things in a new way. I think we tend to do that in life a lot, let something that doesn’t have to be the way it is anymore keep us feeling trapped because we don’t stop and think about why we’re doing things the way we’re doing them. It’s worthwhile to question things every so often and consider whether a change would work.

Or something profound. I just know that now I can see more of my plants and out the window instead of having a big, black thing right in my face.

Since I have a book releasing next week, my progress on the office is going to have to slow down. But I’m determined to get it done this year, even if I do only a little bit every day.

writing life

The Terrifying Office

I got all the book work done, so now I can take things a little more slowly, though I do have launch-related work to do next week. I’ve spent this week so far doing a gradual deep clean of the house. I’m doing the kind of dusting where I take everything off a surface, then clean all the items and the surfaces and polish the furniture and the kind of vacuuming where I move the furniture and go along all the baseboards with a crevice tool. I’m managing about one room a day before I collapse, but I’m going to love the results when it’s all done.

The real challenge is going to be the office. I let my office, which is the upstairs bedroom, get out of control during the years when I was migrating around the house with my laptop instead of working in the office. It turned into a storage room, the place where I dumped everything when I was doing an emergency house cleaning. I got the area around the desk cleaned up earlier this year, so I can work in the office, but the rest needs work to make it a pleasant place to be. It’s a bit overwhelming. I’m not even sure where to begin because it’s the kind of thing where I need to clear out one space to put another thing away to clear that space, but I guess I just need to pick a spot and get started and let it all come together.

I’m also rethinking the way I have things arranged. I put the bookcase with all my books in a corner because I don’t often need to reach those (I have reference copies near my desk if I need to look something up while writing), and I have a cart with my mailing supplies and file folders on the wall behind my desk. But now there’s Zoom, and I don’t really want a bunch of envelopes and file folders as my background, so I’m thinking about switching so that my brag bookcase is behind me and the office supplies are out of sight.

I have this crazy idea to turn my office into a magical forest, but I don’t think that will work in this space. I’d have some fake trees hung with fairy lights and lots of plants. I don’t have the room for that the way things are now, and I haven’t found the right kind of fake tree. For now, I’d settle for the place merely being neat and organized. Then I’ll worry about decorating.

Books

Walking in the Woods

The book I read from my “to be read” shelf last week was A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson. It has a clearance sticker from Half-Price Books on it, so I must have picked it up at a clearance sale at some point because the topic appealed to me, but then I never got around to reading it. This is a non-fiction book about an American writer who’d been living in England for a long time, then moved back to the US. While getting adjusted to being back in his home country, he became fascinated by the idea of the Appalachian Trail and decided he wanted to try hiking the whole thing. He invited a number of people to go with him, and the only person who responded was an old acquaintance he actually found kind of annoying.

Still, they got geared up, flew to Georgia, and began hiking at the beginning of the trail. The book follows their adventures as they spent their days hiking and camped along the trail, covering their hardships and some of the interesting people they met along the way. Interspersed with this story is information about the trail itself, how it came to be, its history, and how it’s maintained. The story parts of the book are often laugh-out-loud funny. These guys were in way over their heads and got into a few scrapes, and there was a lot of sometimes silly conflict between them.

The book appealed to me because I love hiking, and there’s a part of me that would like to do something like that, just set off across the country. However, I’m not sure I could deal with walking all day, then sleeping on the ground, and going days without any kind of shower or real bathroom. There were a few places along the trail where they were able to get to a motel or stay at a lodge, but otherwise it was primitive back country camping, and I’m too much of a delicate flower for that.

I know someone who tried through-hiking the Appalachian Trail a few years ago. She and her pre-teen sons and their dog hiked, and her husband followed along in an RV with their cat (he was able to work remotely). Most of the time, she and the kids would camp on the trail, but when the trail got close enough to meet up with a road, her husband would pick them up in the RV, so they could get a shower and sleep in a bed. When she was able to get a signal, she’d post an update. It was fascinating to read, but I’m not sure I could do it. I don’t remember how far they made it before they decided to stop and come back home, but it wasn’t the whole way even after months of hiking.

Still, reading this book made me really want to go hiking. I love walking and hiking — I’m not sure what the difference is, though I consider hiking to be off paved trails. One reason I live in my neighborhood is its network of walking trails. There’s also a park on the edge of the neighborhood where there are trails through the woods. My happy place is walking through a forest. I don’t do it nearly as much as I’d like to. I started last year with a First Day hike at a state park and had grand ambitions of finding a hiking group, but then the pandemic hit. My last few real vacations were to go hiking. We’re getting to the time of year when you can do long walks and hikes around here, and that’s a lot of what I have planned for my fall break. It was nice getting to do that vicariously while reading this book, and I will appreciate being able to walk for an hour or two, then come home and take a hot shower and sleep in my own bed.

There are some stretches of the Appalachian Trail that are more accessible for day hikes in Virginia, so maybe I’ll keep walking at least a little of the trail on my Bucket List, even if I have no desire to do the whole thing. That was the part in the book that sounded closest to what I think I could do.

Now I kind of want to see the movie based on this book. I can see how much of the story would make a good film, and I’m curious how they deal with the structure. They did a good chunk of the trail before stopping for a break. The author visited some other pieces of the trail on his own, then his friend joined him again to tackle the rest. I’m guessing they cut out the middle part and keep the two guys together. In the movie, the actors are in their 70s while the real people were in their 40s when they did this, so they seem to have turned it into an old guy Bucket List sort of thing. I may wait a little while before watching it because a movie is almost always disappointing soon after you’ve read the book.

My Books

New Mystery for Pre-Order

The next Lucky Lexie Mystery, Secret of the Haunted Hotel, is now available for pre-order at most of the major e-book sellers. It will be released on October 21, so it’ll be just in time for Halloween reading.

All these books have ghosts, so I guess any of them would work for seasonal reading, but this one is about a haunted house and takes place near Halloween, so it’s especially suited for reading when you want things a bit spooky. There’s a storm and the power goes out and there’s a murder in an isolated haunted house. To complicate matters even further, it’s during the haunted house’s grand-opening party for the bed-and-breakfast in the house, and the owners have invited ghost hunters from around the country, along with Lexie, as the local reporter. That means Lexie, who can really see ghosts, will be there along with people who claim they can. That may make it hard for her to keep her secret so people outside the town don’t think she’s a total crackpot.

I’ve been wanting to write a book like this for ages because I’ve always loved those British “house party” mysteries, where there are a bunch of guests at one of those remote country houses, and then someone is murdered. That means one of them is the murderer. I absolutely love that trope and have been wanting to play with it. Adding ghosts makes it even better.

My mom says I should warn people that this book will make people want Mexican food (Margarita caters the party). There’s also hot cocoa and a discussion about what kinds of chocolate make the best s’mores, so you might want to stock up before you read.

I’ve got links to the places where you can pre-order on the book’s page on my site. There will be a paperback, but they don’t let us set up pre-orders for those.

And after this book, I’m done for the year. I’m taking a little time off to refresh myself and recharge, and then I’m going to work on developing an idea I’ve been playing with for a while. You can follow along here and see something about how my process works.

Books

Getting Hooked

Last week, I started reading a book I’d checked out of the library. I was in a bit of a reading slump, as I hadn’t really taken to the last couple of things I’d read, but then very early in this book I got that tingle of “ooh, I’m going to like this.” And that made me stop and think about why — what was it about this book that made me sure I’d like it, that drew me in? It wasn’t the plot, since it hadn’t even really started yet. One of the recent books that I didn’t take to had a plot that should have been catnip to me, but I never really got into it.

Thinking about it, I decided that the thing that makes a book grab me is a character I like who has potential for growth or change. I haven’t done a full analysis of all my favorites yet, but this seems to be a common thread.

For “character I like,” I have to confess that most often that seems to be a character I’m romantically attracted to, the “book boyfriend.” But it can also be a character I relate to. That doesn’t necessarily mean in any demographic sense, stuff like gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, station in life, etc. It’s more about that sense of “I get you.” For instance, I’m not a rogue security android, but the moment I started reading the Murderbot books, I had that “yes, this is a kindred spirit, I get you” sense about Murderbot. And sometimes it’s just a character I like, someone who’s interesting, funny, capable, kind or has some other quality that makes them appealing, even if I don’t relate to them at all and am not at all attracted to them.

This is where a lot of books that I don’t take to go wrong for me. I don’t like the main character. There’s nothing I’m attracted to or relate to, and the person is annoying.

The “potential for growth or change” part was a bit surprising to me because that’s something I struggle with in writing. I have a bad habit of starting out with a character who doesn’t need to learn anything, or I have trouble coming up with the flaw the character needs to overcome. But when I started looking at what hooks me, most often it’s the character who’s in way over their head in a situation they aren’t prepared to deal with. So there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the person. The problem is that they’re in the wrong situation for them, and they’re going to have to rise to the occasion or fail horribly. It’s the “unlikely hero” trope, the “you want me to do what?” story.

The next most common need for change that hooks me is the person with some kind of damage that skews their perspective, and the change you see coming is some kind of healing of that damage. That was the book that most recently hooked me (I’ll discuss it in another post after I’ve read the second book in the series and see how it goes). The main character was someone angry who’d been hurt, and the plot setup was something that I could see leading to some kind of healing. I wanted to see the character be healed, so I was eager to read on.

I’m a bit less interested in the “this is their fatal flaw in how they see the world, and they’re going to have to correct being wrong in order to prevail” story.

When I have a bit more free time, I want to do a good analysis of my bookcases and see how this theory holds up. It does give me a better idea of how I can write character growth — and the need for character growth — in a way that works for me and that I hope will work for readers.

What is it that is most likely to grab you in a book?

Life

Puzzling

I’ve been trying to find some fun things to do that aren’t story related (like reading or watching TV/movies) to give that part of my brain a break, so when I found some jigsaw puzzles on clearance, I bought a couple. I had images of cozy autumn and winter nights, sipping hot cocoa and listening to classical music with a scented candle burning nearby while I leisurely worked on a puzzle.

We used to work puzzles as a family when I was a kid. At Christmas, there was usually a “family” gift of a big puzzle, and then we’d set it up on the dining table (which we generally didn’t use except for special meals) after Christmas dinner, and we’d work on it off and on, whenever anyone wanted to look at it, until we finished it. But it had been a very long time since I’d worked a puzzle, so I thought I’d start with something a little simpler. I had a couple of old Star Wars puzzles I’d taken from my parents’ house when they were clearing out my old things, and I started with one that was aimed for kids, with only 140 pieces.

And I found myself utterly consumed for about an hour and a half as I worked it in one sitting. I was supposedly watching TV while working on it, but I didn’t remember anything I was watching and had to rewatch those episodes. I also could barely move when I went to stand up and had a sore neck. This should have been a warning.

The next puzzle up was 500 pieces, a more complex Star Wars puzzle for older kids. I started it one evening. It was too warm for the candle (candles don’t play well with ceiling fans) or the cocoa, but I did have the classical music playing. The first evening, I mostly tried to find the edge pieces, so it wasn’t too bad. The obsession kicked in the next day. I kept getting sidetracked when I passed the puzzle and paused to see if I could just find that one piece I needed to complete a certain section, only to realize an hour or so had gone by. I didn’t do my usual Friday-night movie because I wanted to finish that one section of the puzzle—and then a couple of hours later it was too late to start a movie. That repeated on Saturday. I dreamed about the puzzle on Saturday night, and the first thing I did the next morning was look at the puzzle. I nearly missed the beginning of online church because I started working on the puzzle. Then I paused by the puzzle on my way to get lunch. There was one piece I needed that I thought would pull a whole section together, and the shape and color should have made it obvious. There weren’t that many pieces left, so I should have been able to find it easily. It did tie it all together, and from there the rest of the puzzle fell into place. I was getting a bit lightheaded, then realized that two hours had passed.

So, I may have a wee bit of a puzzle problem. Thinking about it, I don’t like to have something unsolved, whether it’s a jigsaw puzzle, a crossword puzzle, or even just an error in my knitting. I don’t like to put it down until I’ve figured it out. Puzzles tend to put me in a flow state, where I’m hyper alert but unaware of the passing of time. Up to a point, this can be a positive thing that’s good for the brain, but not when it keeps you from sleeping or doing anything else.

The reality of my puzzle evening is less like the relaxing time with cocoa and classical music and more like me sitting there, wild-eyed, at midnight, going, “I’ll just get that one piece and then I’ll go to bed. Okay, maybe one more piece. One more …”

I don’t know how the 1,000-piece puzzles I bought are going to go. I may have to wait until I have nothing else going on to work on them, or maybe I can cover them and try to put them out of sight and out of mind. Or I’ll set a timer so I don’t completely lose track of time and make myself take exercise breaks. It’s still something I enjoy, and it works a different part of my brain than writing does. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m not starting another puzzle until I have my time-sensitive projects done.

writing life

Sweater Weather

After giving myself Wednesday off to celebrate the arrival of fall, I got back to work yesterday, reading through the whole book in one day. That’s the best way to spot things like repetition (where a character says more or less the same thing multiple times or I use the same description repeatedly) or continuity errors and contradictions. But I did take advantage of our lovely weather by putting the manuscript on my tablet and sitting outside to read it.

I may want to tinker with the ending, but this book won’t require massive rewrites or revisions. I did have some repetition, with the same information conveyed multiple times. They’re talking to different people, so in reality might have told the same story more than once, but I can trim it or reword it so the reader won’t have to read it over and over again. There are also a couple of things I need to set up better. Otherwise, it’s mostly an issue of editing. I was weirdly sloppy in this book. Usually even my first drafts are pretty tight, without a lot of typos. But there are typos galore in this, as well as some repeated or skipped words. I guess I got excited and my brain was going too fast for my fingers. I also found at least one case where a character’s name that was changed didn’t get changed. I’d forgotten the original name, so in reading I had to wonder who that person was supposed to be before it finally dawned on me.

Now I’m doing my editing pass to tighten and polish the book. I’m still hoping to have it published before Halloween, since it’s kind of a Halloween book.

My “yay, I finished a draft” present to myself was a new hoodie. My fall “uniform” is generally a tank top and a hooded sweatshirt, but every year I find myself wishing I could find a lighter weight one, like maybe made of t-shirt material instead of fleece, so it’s just enough to cover my arms without adding a lot of weight but easier to take off when I get warm than if I actually wore a long-sleeved t-shirt. I’d done some searches at places I usually shop without finding anything and mentioned this on Twitter. Someone suggested a particular brand, and while they didn’t have anything, I tried a related brand and scored a jackpot. Even better, Amazon carried this item, and I have free shipping and a gift card, so it was essentially free. And it was in a local warehouse, so I got it the next day. It’s rather ridiculous how happy this one item has made me, but it’s perfect for a chilly morning out on the patio, then I can take it off when it gets warm. It’s actually a bit lighter and more open a weave than t-shirt material, which makes it perfect as a layering piece in semi-warm weather that changes a lot throughout the day.

We won’t get into how many hoodies I own now. And I’m trying to resist the temptation to get another one of these in a different color.

Life

All Autumn in a Day

I finished the first draft of my book yesterday, and that happened to coincide with the arrival of a cold front, and now we have actual fall-like weather for the first day of fall, so it’s a nice day to give myself a break to enjoy it.

It’s the kind of day I joke is All Autumn in a Day in this part of the world, the first day it really feels like fall, and it’s such a relief after a long, hot summer that we tend to go all-out, doing All the Fall Things because it may be the only real fall day we get. You never know. It’s going to start warming up again later in the week and be back to “summer,” and there’s a chance it could stay that way until we get a drastic cold snap and it’s suddenly winter (that actually happened a couple of years ago, when summer lingered into October, and then we got a freeze right before Halloween). It reminds me of the Ray Bradbury story, “All Summer in a Day,” in which a girl who moved from earth to a colony on Venus misses the one afternoon in seven years when the sun comes out because her classmates, who had never seen the sun and didn’t realize what they were missing, locked her in a closet. Except here we do get it every year, but my favorite season still tends to be capricious and brief.

I’ve already had breakfast on the patio, actually wearing a sweatshirt! I have some baking planned for the afternoon, and I’m going to make soup for dinner. I’ll probably have some patio time, sipping cinnamon herbal tea, this evening. There will be a long walk to the library after I get this posted. I don’t drink coffee, so no pumpkin spice lattes for me, but otherwise I’m trying to cram in as much fall as possible, even though the trees are still green and it will be 90 degrees this weekend.

Really, in more temperate climates, our weather today wouldn’t even be considered fall. This is the way their summer is. I’ve been pondering whether I want to stay around here, for a number of reasons, and I’ve been monitoring the weather in some of the places I’ve imagined might be a good fit. This is the kind of weather they started having in August. I remember when we moved to Germany in August and had to go buy sweatshirts because the clothes we’d brought with us from summer in Oklahoma and then traveling to Louisiana and across the south to Charleston were way too light for the weather. There was a discussion on a friend’s Facebook page a few weeks ago when she mentioned looking forward to fall, and one of her friends talked about preferring summer, then listed their idea of summer activities — hiking, camping, going on picnics. Those of us who live in Texas said we liked those things, too, but they were fall activities. That’s why we were looking forward to fall. I think we shift our summer to fall. In a way, our summer is like winter elsewhere, a time we spend as little time as possible outdoors, so we react to fall the way northerners react to spring.

I’ve joked about finding a place where it’s fall most of the time, and that makes me wonder if that’s how a place like that would work for me. Would having weather I associate with early fall, followed by actual fall weather, feel like an extended autumn for me, or would I get used to it and think of it as summer, so it would stop feeling like fall?

Not that I’m planning to move anytime soon. I’d want to travel to a place before making any decisions, and that’s not happening during the pandemic, and I don’t have the money right now to pick up and move across the country. I’ll also need to keep monitoring the weather in other places during the winter. Temperatures in the 80s in August sound heavenly, but what will I think of the winter? I always spend the summer dreaming about being elsewhere, then forget about it in October.

In the meantime, I will enjoy my first day of fall, and then tomorrow get back to work, reading through this book to see if it makes sense. When I get this book totally done and ready to publish, I’m going to dial back for the rest of the year. I’ve got a project I want to develop, and that means a more flexible work schedule that can be done in a variety of locations, so when (if!) we get real fall, I’ll be able to take my work with me as I take walks, so I can sit in the woods or by a lake to work.

Books

Tackling TBR Mountain

I’ve been trying to work my way through my to-be-read pile over the past few years. I did a big purge a few years ago, then reorganized the way I deal with unread books to make it more likely that I would read them. When I say “pile,” “mountain” is more accurate. I had a whole bookcase several rows deep full of unread books and also had unread books mixed in with the books on my regular bookcases. One of my friends referred to my to-be-read collection as “the strategic book reserve.”

I don’t have a bad book-buying habit, though. Most of these books were giveaways, so they’re not books I chose for myself, and that’s a large part of why they remained unread for so long. If I buy a book for myself, I usually read it right away. The exceptions are things like library book sales, where I just grab things that sound interesting. Even those tend to get read pretty quickly. But it’s the conference books that pile up. Publishers give books away at writing conferences, since writers talk about books a lot, and if you give a lot of writers a book, they can spread word of mouth about it well enough to make it a hit.

I used to be involved with the Romance Writers of America. When you checked in to the national conference, they’d give you a tote bag full of books, or else you’d get a ticket to a goodie room and get to go around picking books to put in your tote bag. Then the publishers would have booksignings during the conference where they just gave away the books. For books they really wanted to highlight, they’d put copies on each seat at luncheons. After a few years, I learned to be more selective and only pick up books I thought I might read instead of just going all grabby hands and “boooookkkss!” Still, after more than ten years of these conferences, that added up to a lot of books.

Then I started going to more science fiction events. There aren’t usually a lot of book giveaways at the more fan-oriented conventions, though sometimes there are books on the freebie tables. But you get the same kind of tote bag full of books at the Nebula Awards conference and at the World Fantasy Convention. I got a bunch of mysteries at a mystery convention I went to a couple of years ago.

There are also random things, like a bunch of gothics I got in a bag from my former boss’s wife when they were moving, books by people I know that I got when I went to their booksignings (I try to go to friends’ first booksignings, even if they aren’t something I normally read), books that were gifts, and those bargain books I bought on a whim.

The pile grew because I was afraid to get rid of anything, especially once when I’d attempted a purge but hadn’t gotten around to taking the ones selected for donation anywhere, then read something else by an author whose earlier book turned out to be in the donation bag. What if I gave away something I’d end up wanting?

But I was inspired by Marie Kondo to winnow down the collection to books I actually wanted. A lot of the romances got donated to the library book sale in the great purge when I admitted to myself that I don’t actually like most romances and was probably never going to read them. Getting rid of so many books made the stash less intimidating and made me more likely to read what I had left. I also took all the TBR books off that bookcase and put them in boxes so I could use that bookcase for books I want to keep. Then I filled the small bookcase in my bedroom from those boxes. Now those books are close to where I usually am when I need something to read, and that’s really helped me work through the stash. If I’m not enjoying a book, I let myself put it in the donation bag and move on to something else. When a slot is emptied after I read a book, I fill it with something from the boxes. I’ve emptied a whole box so far. This has allowed me to make more progress in reading through the stash than I’d made in the prior decades, but it does mean I’m getting around to reading a lot of those books that are first in a series that’s now hard to find, which is its own problem. I don’t know when I’ll manage to move out of this house, but I hope by then I’ll have considerably fewer books. A lot of these books aren’t something I’d want to pay to move.