Books & shelving

Lately I've kind of been obsessing over shelving. Especially bookshelves. Mostly because I have what Mr Rubyslippers would call a metric fuck ton of books. And dvds. We have nine, yes, NINE, bookcases in our bedroom and Spare Oom, and the depressing thing is that I've left hundreds of books at my parents' house because there was nowhere to put them here, and I kind of miss them. I mean, I probably wouldn't be reading them anyway, but I miss having them around. Books to me are twofold: they are awesome to read AND they look awesome on a shelf. Maybe it's the collector in me, but I just love the look of rows of books. Especially if there's a full series. MMm. This is probably why I still look out for the Nancy Drews I don't have, even though I haven't read one for years. I am a completist.

Anyway, lately I've been saving a lot of pictures of bookshelves and just shelving in general. Some practical, some not at all, but still totally awesome.

This is what I've always wanted: a full wall of shelving (except mine would go all the way up to the ceiling, because, really, that's just wasted space up there!)

Another one that's pretty awesome:

But then I see awesome things like this, and I want them, no matter how much space they waste:

Clearly I like tree-shaped things. :-)

And then I get into swirly shapes, and it just sets my heart aflutter:

And my personal favourite:

Look, another tree:

I love the idea of this, even though the book-lover in me cringes at the idea of leaving a book lying open face-down like that. It's SO bad for the spine! But look how cute, like a little birdhouse!

This is so elegant:

And this is completely crazy:

I'm so obsessed with interior decor at the moment!

How NaNoWriMo stole November

Because in November I pretty much vanished from this blog, didn't I? I'm not going to keep apologising or make excuses. Except this:

There was NaNoWriMo.
Have you heard of NaNoWriMo? It's short for National Novel Writing Month. You can read more here, but the basic premise is that you have to write 50 000 (yes, fifty thousand) words during the month of November. It can be any kind of story you want, but you're not supposed to go back and read over what you've done and change things, because that slows you down and discourages you. The point is to make you write, however bad it might be; just to let the words flow out, and worry about fixing it later.

Mr Ruby Slippers and some of our mutual friends were taking part, but I wasn't sure if I was gong to have the time and, let's face it, the dedication to do it. But I'm terribly guilty of starting stories and never finishing them. I write the good bits and then I give up after 2000 words, or something. And there was a novel I'd been writing on and off for over two years, which really needed some impetus. In two years I'd written about 16000 words of it, and, while those wouldn't count - everything has to be written in November - it was something I could definitely carry on with. You don't need to write a complete novel, just 50000 words of it.

However, by the time November rolled around, I was still dithering about taking part. Mr Ruby Slippers got cracking on Day One (a Sunday) and wrote even more than the daily target (which was a1667 words). I, on the other hand, went off to rehearsal, danced, painted, sang, and came home exhausted. Wash, rinse and repeat on the Monday and Wednesday, and by Saturday I still hadn't decided if I was even going to take part. And if I did, I was going to be incredibly behind - the target for that day was 11667 words. Still, it was Saturday, I felt bright and chirpy (for once), so I decided to start and see how it went.

Of course, once I'd started I had that "I will not fail and get beaten by my husband and friends" competitive feeling come over me, so I persevered and wrote nearly every day, even when I wanted to throw the keyboard on the floor and scream at my characters for talking like a really bad soap opera. Even when my arms and neck were aching and I just wanted to watch Glee or House or ANYthing that would let me sit back and not have to think about what to write next.

Here's my stats graph for November. Having a graph you can use to see how you're doing compared to the target and compared to others is really motivating! The blue bars are the daily targets, and the brown ones are where I was each day. I started late, but I trucked along just behind target every day, only finally hitting it on the last day. But that's typical of me. I was always the one having to get up early to finish school projects on the morning they were due, and writing essays during break before they had to be handed in. Oh, school. You were...fun in spots, but better to look back on. :-)

Anyway, my point is - I WROTE 50000 WORDS IN NOVEMBER! It's completely crazy, and the book is nowhere near finished, and it's pretty damn sucky, I'm sure, but I DID IT.

Skreeeeee!!!

And that, readers (if you're still out there!) is what happened to my November. Well, it's part of what happened to my November...

Bookishness

I was reading a post on Good Finking earlier about choosing books, and I got to wondering why I'd never really mentioned my book collecting thing on here. It's weird that I haven't, because books have been a really huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. I had a bookcase earlier than I can even remember getting it, and it was filled with picture books and comics at the bottom, and Enid Blytons and Roald Dahls on the top two shelves. I practically existed on a diet of Blyton for the first five years of my reading life. My mother would read me a short story every night before I went to bed (thanks, Mom!) and the first story I ever read by myself was a Blyton story called "Colin is a good policeman". Sigh. Those were good days.

It's come to my attention since then that Enid Blyton really didn't happen in the USA, so some of you might not know what the heck I'm on about. But if your childhood lacked the Faraway Tree, where a different magic land appeared at the top every so often, the crime-fighting Famous Five (or Secret Seven), the jolly fun at Malory Towers or the enchanted toys and fairies of many of her stories, then, well...I don't want to say I feel sad for you, because I'm sure your childhoods were perfectly happy, and not filled with a Blyton-shaped void, but I don't know *what* I would have been doing if I hadn't had her books, so I'm glad for myself. :-)

Anyway, I carried on reading these well into my teens, under cover, of course, because The Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid you are a 15-year-old reading about kids catching smugglers instead of Sweet Valley High. But at some point I'd had enough of them. Not because I was tired of the delightful happiness of them all, but because I was literally tired of reading the same books over and over and over and over and over. I couldn't even begin to tell you how many times I reread some of my favourites, but it must be well over a hundred.

And it was round about this time that I discovered the delight of BRITISH SCHOOLGIRL STORIES.

Mostly written between the 1920s and 1950s, this type of boarding school story, where everything revolves around hockey matches, midnight feasts, playing tricks on the French Mistress, and being bound by the schoolgirl code of honour, lost impact in the 60s, and as a result, most of the titles have been out of print for over 50 years. Which makes it even more fun to collect them, because you can't actually buy what you want, you can only buy what you find! That, my dears, is the excitement of it all. Not to mention that (a) I still really enjoy these old-fashioned stories, and (b) some of the rarer titles are worth a truckload of money. Except that I'd never sell them, of course. So I spend my life hoping for duplicates to come along. :-)

Now I'm a collector by nature. I have to have a complete set of something, all pretty and (hopefully) matching on the shelves, so you can imagine how this drives me nuts. The holes in my collection keep mocking me, I tell you. They cry out to me in the night, and I dream about finding that elusive copy of The School in the Woods or The Chalet School in the Oberland. Which is probably never going to happen, considering how impossible it is to find these books, and how much they COST on ABE (which, by the way, is the second-hand book-buyer's best friend).

Here's a quick shot I took of one of my bookcases. There are more, but some of them are still hanging out at my parents' house because we keep thinking we're going to move and then don't.

They're so PRETTY. I love the old dustwrappers and the thickish, browned pages. They smell so delicious.

One of my favourites.

Oh, and if you were wondering where I got this book-collecting thing from, take a look at my parents' house:

And I promise you this isn't all of the shelves. I also feel the need to apologise for the photo quality - it was very dark in there and I hadn't brought my flash with me. Pop-up flash is not cool.