It makes me crazy
Or, as my husband G. Grod would be quick to note, crazier than usual. I’m reading multiple books right now, and I’m having a hard time of it. I can’t tell if I’m feeling fuzzy and fragmented as an effect of being in the midst of multiple readings, or if I’ve broken my usual hard and fast rule against multiple books because I’ve been feeling out of focus.
No matter. Either way, as cause or effect, I am not an advocate of being in the midst of multiple books. I hate multi-tasking. Thus it is good that I no longer have a corporate job, and bad that I’m a mom because it’s very, very hard to just do one thing at a time while caring for my toddler, Drake.
I formed my hard and fast rule some time ago, when I realized that reading more than one book at a time just made each one harder to follow, and slower to finish. So it’s been one book at a time for some time now.
I’m gearing up for a writers conference, though, and I’m also trying to put some finishing edits on novel #1. So I put the novel I was reading–Tam Lin by Pamela Dean–aside so I could read something more relevant to the tasks at hand. I then picked up The Best American Non-Required Reading 2002, edited by Michael Cart and Dave Eggers. I also started on the articles from the most recent edition of the Children’s Writers and Illustrators Market. In the midst of these I’ve been reading a lot of different comics (Fables, Books of Magic, 100 Bullets, Gotham Central, Y the Last Man, Ex Machina, Girl Genius, Planetary….) My head is spinning with fact and fiction, and I’m wondering about the easiest way to get off this merry-go-round yet still do the reading I need to do.
It’s probably not reading more comics. But I think that’s what I’m going to do anyway. Perhaps it’s my subsconscious telling me I’m not getting my daily recommended allowance of fiction by reading the Cart/Eggers collection and the Writer’s Market. See what happens when I don’t get fiction? It’s not pretty.