Today's changes to my stack of library requests:

1) Cancelled my request for Bitterblue (12 of 27 on the wait list), due to borrowing iuliamentis's copy while I was spending the day with her.

2) Requested Lonesome Dove, so I can find out why my brand-new tiny nephew is named Call.

3) Requested What Maisie Knew, so I can brace myself for the movie version starring Alexander Skarsgard. And some other people.

...So then I moved, and that whole process kind of sucked. But now it's over, and I'm starting to actually believe that this is where I live, and the new job location is where I work, and this is my life and I should probably get on with it.

This probably means writing goals should be back in action, but aside from adding the target word counts back on to my word count spreadsheet, I don't really know how to articulate writing goals right now. I want to be editing the novel I finished last year, but I'm still waiting on input; I guess I should either stop waiting and start rewriting based on what I've gotten so far, or resume poking people for their feedback and start writing a new one in the meantime. I started a new novel back in February and dutifully wrote 5,000 words for that month's goal, and ... really didn't miss that at all when I took two months off from writing goals, which seems like a sign that I was not really engaged with that idea. Also in two months I haven't thought about it at all and so still haven't worked out ... characters or a specific plotline. So now I should probably try a different novel idea. I am feeling a lot of blank-page inertia about starting someting totally new, but I guess the only way out of that is to write some damn words.

For the last week I've been reading Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah, which, in the immortal words of someone I once lent a book to and didn't get it back from for a really long time, is really good but I just can't get into it. And which is not about bringing along a small citrus fruit for company when you travel, but about retracing the footsteps of a 14th century traveller from Tangiers. It's ostensibly popular travel/history writing, but I am so totally devoid of frame of reference for travel in the Middle East, or the medieval history thereof, or the untranslated Latin and British geographic/cultural references that the author keeps dropping in that I'm just kind of skimming for descriptions of scenery and random travel anecdotes and not feeling like I'm really getting anything out of the book.

Plus, book group is next week, and it's time to start reading this Gene Wolfe book. So Tangerine is going back on the stack of library books and I'll see if I manage to pick it up again before I have to return it.

1. I have started Packing For Real. Nine boxes of books so far, three and a half bookcases to go. Plus the DVDs. I am feeling like packing is ... pretty much under control? And am very pleased with the clever, clever me of 2008 who hoarded all these cardboard boxes for reuse. Me of 20-whatever is going to be shaking her fist at me of 2012, but I don't think I'm going to have room to store them all again for next time.

2. Books! I have been trying to read things that would be happy/fun/etc., so last week I read Gwen Raverat's Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood, a memoir about growing up as a granddaughter of Charles Darwin at the end of the 19th century. Then I read Goliath, the concluding volume of Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, and had the very odd realization that Dr. Barlow, the lady boffin, was also Gwen's cousin Nora who was never allowed to go out of doors barefoot.

The other entertaining connection I made was recognizing an anecdote from Period Piece which was related--virtually word for word--in Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life. I quite enjoy this ephemeral sense of being well-read. *g*

3. I have been continuing to read more short fiction (by which I mean, more than none), and it all gives me the very strong sense that I am not a natural writer of short fiction. It's not just a general sense of "I don't think I can DO this", although that is an element. It's also a sense of "Why on Earth would you do that much worldbuilding and character development and then not write a novel?" So. That's my set of biases making themselves obvious.

Now, off to submit some short stories....

1. Change of job-location is going well so far. I really like everyone I work with and the job I'm doing (inasmuch as I know what job I'm doing; a few things are still not perfectly clear), so the main downside is the car-to-bus commute, which is a bit aggravating, but on the bright side, temporary.

1a. Temporary because there are only twelve work days between me and moving. Oh God. Let's not talk about that part.

2. In wild defiance of logic and the fact that I'm about to put them all in boxes anyway, today I shifted things around so that there is a separate location for unread non-fiction books and all the unread fiction books are on one bookcase. Then I rough-sorted the unread and uncatalogued non-fiction into a semblance of Dewey order. But I didn't alphabetize the unread fiction, so I Do Not Have a Problem.

3. Doing Hugo nominations made it really apparent to me that for a while there I was reading quite a bit of short fiction, and then I got distracted by something shiny and stopped doing that. So now I'm trying to read more again. One of my favorites this week is From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit, by Gary Kloster, which I think I summarized for my future reference as "alien monkey wants to Uplift humans!"

So Tuesday went like this:

10:30 - view apartment down in Riverwest. Fall in love with apartment, really want to apply for it even before realtor starts making noises about how many other people are viewing it that day. Apply. Write check for first month's rent to demonstrate how serious I am. Resolve to be totally patient and chill about new apartment; after all, there's no big rush about moving, if I get it I get it, if not I'll keep looking until I fall in love with some other apartment.

2:00 - boss walks up to me and says, "So, you're getting a change of scenery." Find out I'm being transferred to the Central Library downtown (two miles on a direct bus route from the prospective apartment; ten miles from where I live now, which is decidedly not on a direct bus route).

5:00 - go over to sub at other branch which is having a huge event for Dr. Seuss's birthday. Dozens of tiny children running around, to say nothing of the surly teenagers. And the alderman.

8:00 - come home from work, check email and phone six thousand times waiting for word on the apartment.

9:00 - watch Southland, because that is totally good for reminding me that I might be stressed out but at least no one's shooting at me.

I did find out, Wednesday morning, that I got the apartment. And a bit later on yesterday I found out that my transfer is effective at the next break between pay periods. So in a week and a half I move jobs, then two weeks after that, I get possession of the new apartment, and a week after that the actual full-on move should be happening, and April 9 I'm out of this apartment. So. Uh.

Writing goals are in abeyance for March and April. Is what I am saying. O.O

So, once again I'm abandoning a book I've been reading for a week and a half and still haven't gotten halfway through. Granted that I spent several days not reading it because of brain-immersion elsewhere--I didn't miss it, and today when I picked it up again I still wasn't particularly anxious to keep going with it. Also I already missed the book club meeting I'd meant to read it for, so into the return bin you go, book.

The book in question was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and it actually was interesting in the way where I don't feel a particular impulse to read 418 pages of it (plus appendices and notes). The premise is that there are two ~systems~ of ~thought~ going on in every person's ~mind~. One (the fast one) is sort of the autopilot, and one (the slow one) is the deliberative process we're aware of as conscious thought. Through the first, oh, 140 pages, most of what I got from it is that System 1 makes or influences a lot of decisions that you think you're making with System 2.

It made me go "Huh" a lot, and, if I had spent any amount of tiime reading it continuously, left me trying to peer at my own thought processes afterward, which is sort of disorienting.

But at this point I think I would rather be reading The Girl Who Played with Fire, so off I go.

So I lost a few days to compulsive epic fic-reading, which was enough to tip a couple of months of vague discombobulation (lots of weekends traveling and weekends working and a few instances of coming just close enough to getting sick to be lying around a lot) into actually being unable to stand my surroundings. So: spent the day tidying up and doing ALL THE LAUNDRY and emailed somebody about seeing an apartment (I am contemplating moving to a neighborhood that is an actual neighborhood and not a quasi-bedroom-community-suburb just inside the city limits), and I feel much better about my life now.

February worked out pretty well for writing goals. I got 5,000 words into the new novel attempt, submitted three short stories a total of six times, and poked #1 Reader about getting the previous novel back to me. I wrote a total of 23,927 words, which was over 95% of my goal, so I definitely got an A for February.

March's writing goals are another 5,000 words on the novel and 25,000 total, and keeping the short stories shuffling through the process, and poking more people about the previous novel, with an eye to being ready to edit in April. I'm starting with three days of totally failing at writing and emailing people, but, hey, it's a 31-day month, so it's practically just like February all over again.

I just managed to submit a story to Strange Horizons!

Normally sending a story in is not actually cause for celebration, but not only have they been closed to submissions for aaaages, now that they're open again they're apparently only accepting a limited number of stories per day, starting at midnight. So I actually do feel like just getting the chance to submit a story is an accomplishment, at this point. *g*

Now I just have to hope that a story structured kind of like a moebius strip doesn't count as an instantly-disqualifying twist ending....

...Or to co-working, if it's a co-working night.

Anyway: after a week and a half of plodding through Downbelow Station twenty pages at a time, today I spent twenty minutes thinking I was about to reach the halfway point. And then I realized my math was wrong and I was still not halfway through the book, and the disappointment of not being halfway through broke the last of my determination to actually finish the book. So I inserted it gently but firmly into the book drop when I got back to work after lunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying the sensation of being free to read whatever I want now that I've let go of my determination to read that one.

(It was really good, I just couldn't get into it.)

Anyway. Now I'm at co-working, I've got all of my current set of short stories out at markets as of ten minutes ago, and I guess I should probably try to get to page four of the new novel thing now.

And then some days you sit there staring at 750words, totally flummoxed, and then give up and start a new novel. So... that's happening, apparently.

I think I had not much in the way of goals for January; I submitted one story and continued failing to submit the other. So... goodish. I did learn that while it's all well and good not to pressure myself to write for a month, if I actually don't write for longer than about four days I get all miserable. An entire week and I become convinced I've forgotten how to write and have to whine a lot before I sort out how to get started again. Maybe this will be the time I learn not to do that again.

So, now it's February! Goals are: get to five thousand words on the novel, write 25,000 words all together, and submit both existing short stories. And keep submitting them. And bother people about their opinions of 2011's novel, now that it's been long enough that I feel vaguely curious to look at it again. And maybe stop forgetting this LJ exists.

In other news of ... something else, I have been trying to learn to write half-decent book reviews by writing them for the blog at work. In case anyone is interested in being persuaded to read them, you can check out my reviews of: The Parable of the Sower, The Arctic Marauder, and The Scottish Prisoner, aka John and Jamie's Awesome Crime-Fighting Road Trip.