Recent Keepers

I'm kicking back and relaxing a bit,

which is another way of saying that today I sat down to work and didn't get anything much done,

though I may have indulged in Deep Thought.

Anyway ...

Recent additions to the Keeper Shelf

Judith Ivory, Angel in a Red Dress

I imagine there might be a Judith Ivory book that doesn't go on the Keeper Shelf. I mean ... I subscribe to this as a theory. Hasn't happened yet, of course.

Pam Rosenthal, The Edge of Impropriety

I've been reading everything of hers I can get my hands on since she beat the pants off poor Spymaster's Lady in the RITA competition.
Just saying.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

What kind of parent names their helpless and innocent kid, 'Jerome Jerome'? Is this the emotional trauma that leads one to write comedy?

Eloisa James, A Duke of Her Own

This may be her best. I'm going to come back to it in a few months and see why the plot works.

Loretta Chase, Lord Perfect

I love Loretta Chase. Y'know.

David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris

Which has moved onto the Research Keeper Shelf -- a shelf which obeys wholly different rules from the Regular Keeper Shelf.

I'm going to have to do a Revolutionary and Napoleonic France Bibliography one of these days.

Tanith Lee, The Secret Books of Venus

I don't want to write like Tanith Lee. The writing is too complex and too distracting for the sort of story-telling I'm trying to do.
But she sure does write pretty.

I didn't read these half dozen books today and yesterday, of course. This is the pile of books ready to be put up on the Keeper Shelf. It's been accumulating a while. Six months or so.

I have great books still on the TBR shelf.
Including one by Mary Jo Putney
which is next on the list.

.

I finally sat down and opened Maass' Writing the Breakout Novel. I've been taking Maass down from the TBR shelf and putting him back for four or five years. Then, at the July RWA Conference in Washington I got to listen to about the first fifteen of a speech he was giving and it engendered in me a desire to get to the book.

Though I'm only through the Introduction.
Why I'm mentioning this ...

Maass says,

"Complexity will do that to you. [overwhelm you] Do not panic. Trust the structure of your outline; or if you are an organic writer who works in successive drafts, trust your unconscious mind. The story is there inside you in all its complexity."

So now I know that I'm an 'organic writer'.
I didn't have a name for it before, I just did it.

.

Whenever I see Maass' name, I think there's something wrong with typewriter keys, somewhere.

.

Oh. And being FTC compliant I just want to say that nobody gave me any of those books for free.
Or anything for free, really.
Though I did pick up the Jerome K. Jerome book at the SPCA Rummage sale so one could argue that the SPCA is paying me off, I suppose.