Books

Recently my publisher decided to forego the publishing of print books for eBooks. It is cheaper I suppose, and technology enables readers to download reading material instantly. My last book was published as an eBook, in fact. All of my print books are now available as eBooks. It makes me a little sad to think that I will never be able to hold one of my books in my hands again.
Although I own a Kindle and an iPad on which I have downloaded many books, I do prefer to hold a paper book in my hands. I like the smell of the ink and the way the pages feel. I like the sound of those pages when I turn them. I like to organize them on my bookshelves at camp, and I like the way the colors of the covers brighten the room.
You can see my Little Sebago Lake camp bookshelf here.
When I am visiting others folks’ homes, I like to explore their bookshelves to see what they like to read. That’s why I was delighted to find a website called Breathing Books devoted to showcasing photographs of other readers’ bookshelves. Call me old fashioned.

Writer's block

This summer I am trying to finish a book about Marie Peary, the daughter of the Arctic explorer. I may have mentioned this in an earlier post. Fact is, I’m not making very much progress. Too many distractions. First, there is lake living itself. There are lots of things to do here here—listen to the loons, watch the hummingbirds, paddle the kayak, feed and entertain guests, and on and on. The biggest distraction of all, though, is the technology I brought here to help me finish researching and writing the damn book. Yesterday went like this:

I woke up and decided to devote the entire morning to writing chapter 4 (I told you I hadn’t got very far). I sat down at the computer, opened up a new file, and titled it Chapter 4. Hmmmm. How to begin? I reread the draft of Chapter 3 and fiddled with a few sentences there. This all took about 20 minutes and I still couldn’t think of how to begin Chapter 4.
So, I decided to check in on my email. Three messages---all from students (this summer, I have 20 writing students from my university in Ohio). It only took five minutes to read the messages, but one student gave a link to website she wanted me to review as a possible source for her project. That took another 10 minutes. Oh yes, and while I was on the internet, I decided to check my Face book posts. Oops, someone posted something controversial on my wall—I then needed to post and upload a video and link in order to make a rebuttal. First, I had to find the link. Another fifteen minutes.

I decided to knock off for lunch at 11 a.m. and after that I had to watch the news and after that, I was a little sleepy so I took a walk to wake myself up. The walk made me tired, so I decided to take a little nap, and when I woke up, I didn’t feel like writing anymore. Therefore, I decided to devote today to working on Chapter 4 and here I am writing this blog post. Now that it’s done, I think I’ll have lunch because it is 11 a.m. After that, I’ll work on Chapter 4.