Rainy Day Reads

(I'm telling the histories of some of the old, used books on my shelves. Read the series introduction  here ) I got this when I worked at a used bookstore. We had people donate boxes of used books, and if we couldn't/didn't want to sell them we would put them on the clearance shelf.  And the great thing about the clearance shelf was the rule where employees could take home the clearance books for free. It was great for me, because there was often used copies of classics I wanted to read that weren't in bad condition, they were just older editions that weren't very lucrative. Such the case with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I've seen the Disney movie, but I heard the book was different, and wanted to see for myself, and this cover isn't horrendous, so I took it home. Usually classic book covers are hideous, but I actually like how this one was put together. Except, when I brought it home, I realized that it actually REEKED of cigarett

I did it. Thursday, Nov. 30th, I went to a friends house and we had a last sprint party, stayed up until 1AM, and drank cocoa, and I finished with about 51k words. I'm honestly in shock, and it hasn't sunk in yet. A friend was congratulating me, and I just said, "I honestly have literally no idea how I did it," and her reply was: "Good tea and the power of Jesus." Amen and that's pretty much it. I worked, AND had surgery, AND had family stuff, AND still did the thing. But planning is weird now, because I had someone invite me to go on an all day shopping trip sometime in December for Christmas shopping, and my first reaction was all: "But wait, I need to write 2K words, I can't - OH WAIT." Kind of like how after I graduated the fact that I DIDN'T have homework every evening was strange to me. It was honestly an exercise in discipline. I CAN write 2k words a day, but I just need to set aside time for it. I was al

Nano: When even your coffee is telling you to wake up {Somehow this didn't post properly a week ago when it was supposed to. So here it is, a bit late} Well, I seem unable to do better than staying less than several thousand words behind. In fact, I think that I'm doing worse in keep up since last week (looks up Nano chart. Yup. 11,00 words behind, now*cries*). I kind of wasted a perfect weekend to catch up by burning myself out by being too ambitious on my first day off and giving myself MAJOR burnout for the rest of the weekend, so that was smart. And I was doing so well! And also this was supposed to be a week 2 update and now it's a week 2 AND 3 update. So not only am I failing at nano, but also everything else. {UPDATE: I also failed to post this properly in November, so there's that, too.} Okay, despair over. Let's do a little review of my last two weeks and what happened. Nano week 2 I continued to keep up with my daily wordcounts, and e