Warning: This one is going to drift and wander a bit – just capping off a very busy week and trying to transition to my writing from everything that came before.
Anyone who’s a regular reader has probably gotten a feel for the routine I’ve established. My work leaves me with little time to write during the week – particularly given the fact that every post takes a good hour or more. I can usually get my reading in during those hours after dinner and before lights out or when I travel. My only time to write is on the weekends and I almost always manage to get a couple of new pieces up every Saturday while my wife is at work. I’m running behind this week – Sunday evening and I’m only just sitting down at the keyboard – but it’s all for good reason. Summer’s coming, colleges are letting out and the two parts of our lives that help make everything good and fun in the world are either home or are headed home. Things get busy around here during summer break.
No way I can begin to describe how proud I am of these two. My step-daughter – who came back home this Friday – just finished her Sophomore year and is doing everything right – great grades, working, active member of a really superb Sorority, involved in a really cool service organization – I honestly, truly don’t know how she does it all and it leaves me feeling a bit embarrassed about how I spent my college years. She delights and amazes me and I love the chance to watch her succeed – doing so much in such a short period of time and doing it all so very well.
My son – who will be here soon – is also doing really well. He stepped back from his first college after a hard year – smart enough to know it just wasn’t a good fit – and spent the last year working through as many college pre-requisites as possible in Community College while trying to figure out where he wanted to be and what he really wanted to do. He put a lot of thought and effort into it – decided on a school that I’m sure is going to be right for him and worked really hard to get a transfer acceptance – which happened just this Friday. He took control of his own process, made some great decisions, did the work to get what he wanted and will be starting back in next fall with a lot of credit hours in the bank and with a real plan for this part of his life.
To top it all of – both of them are headed overseas to work and study this summer. Not to tempt fate but they’re on their way and my wife and I are starting suspect that we didn’t completely screw this whole thing up.
All of which is meant to be an excuse for being behind on my writing. When you combine the kids’ coming home with the fact that the weather has finally turned and has given us the chance to do some gardening, there was just no time.
None of which kept me from reading – along the lines I’d mentioned in this post last weekend:
On The Shelf – Binge Week – Military Science Fiction – 4/29/2018
Finished 4 books – “Standing The Last Watch”, “The Rods And The Axe”, “Decisively Engaged” and “Empire Of Bones” – all of which I plan to post on tonight – assuming I don’t fall asleep at the keyboard. What’s more – with one notable exception – I had a lot of fun plowing through them – enough so that I’ll probably continue this binge for another week or so.
I also changed my buying patterns a bit. Ever since I purchased my 1st i-Pad, I’ve always used the iBook app for my e-book purchases. I have a pretty extensive e-library of those books that were never important enough to purchase as a hard copy or as a collectible.
In attempting to purchase all those military science fiction titles, I found that only one of them was available through the i-Book app. I made the mistake of buying those I couldn’t download to i-Books and having them shipped to the house – reading them as they arrived. Unfortunately, the three I enjoyed – contrary to expectations – are all first entries in extended series and there was no way I was going to start filling the house up with paperbacks – particularly books that – without exception – fall into the guilty pleasure category. There’s a ton of military science fiction being written – most of which is junk – and the stuff that’s not – the ones I wind up enjoying – is just not stuff that I’m going to hold onto. Like I said in that earlier post – even the good stuff is literary junk food and there is no reason to keep it around once you’ve finished your binge.
The whole thing prompted me to – finally – download the Kindle app and start shopping the Amazon Kindle store. Three comments: 1) every one of these series is available on the Kindle, 2) it was so easy AND cheap that I wound up buying all 13 additional entries across the three series and 3) why the h*ll have I not done this long ago. It left me feeling both satisfied that I found a way to get readable copies of all those books at a really reasonable price and pretty stupid for not having done this before.
There you have it – a week in review – plenty of reading done – and ready to write.
Time to get started.