Wheee!

Today is a good day, and I feel verbose. There's no point in feeling verbose if you can't talk, so here's a random blog post all about how happy I'm feeling.

That and other things, by the way.

I have 624... or whatever... books on my GoodReads to-read list.

This is a really scary number. I've officially passed the "100-books-past-500-books" point. I think once you pass that, there is very little chance you'll get below 500 ever again. Ever. Each book leads to another fifteen books. Each person you know might have loved or hated a certain book... and then you have to read that book yourself, to find out why.

Since I have... 5 books to read and little time in which to accomplish the feat (we leave Sydney, and a great deal of books behind, at 8am on the 16th), I've made a plan.

I'll be reading a few books, prioritizing others, and setting lots of time limits in order to accomplish it. Vitamin-R, a new Mac application my wonderful daddy bought for me, will be helping. A lot.

Reading is going well. It's really strange/comforting to be taking notes while I read. For some reason, I feel a lot better about the fact that I might actually remember what I'm reading. On the other hand, I'm using up my notebook, and I can't carry around a notebook and a book and a pen around all the time.

This will have to be figured out. Even if my handwriting sucks, I tend to prefer handwriting to typing when I'm reading. It's more... simple, especially when I'm reading on a screen. Writing, on the other hand, is much simpler when I'm typing. I'm faster that way.[397 words

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I feel really bouncy for absolutely no reason, and my head hurts a bit from trying to remember all the books I'm going to simply have to read now.

Does anyone else get this? It should be universal, I suffer from it so much. I have allusions to a billion different writers and books running around my head, along with a very, very certain-sure feeling that I simply have to read Ulysses now.

Back to How To Read Literature Like a Professor, Macbeth, and The Witch of Portobello! Wish me luck. Perhaps I might even start one of the last two tonight!

—

But I promised updates:

April 22^nd (for me… for the rest of the world it will be April 21^st at ten AM, to April 22^nd at ten AM), I'll be participating in You'll Love This One!'s group Toppler.

The point of a toppler is to read books that are already on your shelves. To facilitate reading, there are certain awards which you can receive, from the most ridiculous to the most interesting.

For example, in the February Toppler (theme: classics), one award was for reading a book written during or before 1^st century BC. In April (theme: read books you've wanted to for quite some time), one award is for reading a book in a new way. I have a fantastic idea for how I'm going to read The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway. I won't say a word now, though.

The fact that it's on a Sunday, that I told my dad the toppler would be on the 21^st, and the idea that this particular one is of a 24-hour variety (thus necessitating a loong day spent at home) makes my parents wonder, yet again, exactly from whose side of the family I descend. It doesn't bother me. I'm going to enjoy myself with Wuthering Heights, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and as much of Ulysses as I can.

The motivation for choosing these particular books is because of the awards. Otherwise, I'd be reading The Absentee, And Then There Were None, etc, which are for another challenge (which finishes June 30^th, and which I've read only 2/13 books for. Lovely, eh?). It's all planned out, particularly how I'll actually (hopefully) sleep in on Saturday.

And I'll be blogging during my break times— about a great deal of things, probably, including how tired I am. It will be very interesting, for posterity, to find out what on earth I was thinking at 17.

Er...

I must be a really bad person because I haven't even attempted to figure out what to post here for the past two months.

I'm not going to attempt to explain why (it's a mix of plain laziness and a lack of will), but I will say that I'm not going to worry about it.

I'm seventeen years old. I've decided I'm not going to bog my life down with things until I absolutely have to. I'm on the road trip of a lifetime and I'm not going to worry about anything except writing my worlds and reading all the books I can before college.

Which brings me to the fact that, even though I've finally almost-kind-of gotten out of the Riddle Rose rut I've been in since early January, and though I haven't read The Absentee, which has been on the to-read list since late January, I'm not going to worry about it.

Instead, I'm going to focus on finishing the books I've picked up in New Zealand backpacking camp book exchanges. These are the greatest inventions known to mankind.

And I'm going to focus on reviewing those books.

And then I'm going to figure out how to make them qualify as proper blog posts.

Or, in another turn of events, I'm going to finish Riddle Rose. And then I'm going to drop it for a while, perhaps pick it back up in a year or two when I feel properly fortified enough with forgetfulness to read it through. When I finish Riddle Rose, possibly by the end of April, I'm going to work on Pirate Prince. And when I finish that, possibly by the end of May, I'm going to get ready to write a proper novelette. I'm going to aim for 60,000 words for Camp NaNoWriMo, I'm going to figure out what works for me best-- I'm not going to plan the ending, I'm not even going to plan out the first chapter-- just a few characters and a basic plot line. Once I write the first chapter, I'll figure out what happens next. I might even blog about the writing of it.

Or, perhaps, I'll just stare at my laptop screen and reread the PDFs I have on it. It may not be a particularly productive use of time, but... I'm still seventeen, and I won't have the time to do this when I'm eighteen next time this year.

I'll be in college. I still have no idea what I want to study-- perhaps something with education or development. It seems so much easier now to just head off to college than it was five months ago.

So?

What's the fate of this blog going to be?

- Temporary updates on my reading life, rants on reading life, ideas as to why I want to read so many books, books people should read, books I've read and reviews of them... etc.

- Temporary updates on my writing life, rants on writing life, rants as to why I think I can actually write a story... story ideas, possible other stuff.

- Temporary updates on life in general-- like stuff I'm going to do with it.