Day: November 1, 2020

My Reading History and My Goodreads Account

November 1, 2020 2 of 8

It’s funny. My handwriting is pretty bad and I get handwriting fatigue pretty easily (this is not a side effect of typing so much — I’ve been shaking my hand to help alleviate the fatigue since long before I ever touched a computer). And when we have multiple bottles of a script to fill at work, there’s a way to set the computer up so that it automatically prints out that number of labels, with “1 of x,” “2 of x,” etc.

There are a few medications that don’t generally have that turned on, like ibuprofen 800, because we don’t usually dispense an entire bottle. So, if I got, like, 180 tablets (we have — I got a script for 270 of them once), I would hand-write the sequence on them. Since my hands tire so easily, I write them “1/6,” “2/6,” etc. and do you know how long it took me before I had to resist the temptation to reduce those fractions?

Anyway, preparatory to using 240 of my 274 books in my Goodreads history as Gratuitous Amazon Links, I’m cleaning up my read dates. So many of those 274 books are things that I read before Goodreads, so I won’t be able to use that tactic on a bunch of them. And, since I’m working on a Nancy Drew reread project, I guess I will be able to try to sell you a copy of The Secret of the Old Clock.* It has a read date.

I guess I’m going to do some rereading, or try to remember which of these hundreds of books I read on or around their release dates and I can fake it. Or both. Probably both.

Also, I’m looking at some of these books and cringing because OMG, so they won’t be Gratuitous Amazon Links.

Oh, and it turns out that only 94 of those books have read dates, so I’ll be doing a lot of rereading and/or estimating. Eeek.

*Look! A not-so-gratuitous Amazon link! We’ll be seeing this again later this month, probably, when the pressure is on for me to post and I forget that I already posted this one.

Warmup Post NaNoWriMo 2020

11/1/20 1 of 8

I don’t know how long this is going to be. I’m not even sure what it’s going to be about. Maybe I’ll just ramble for a couple of hundred words and then post. I know that I’m normally up until, like 1 am or whatever most nights, but I’m already pretty punchy and will probably go to bed soon.

Do I need to do any laundry tonight? That’s a good question that I should research once I’m done with this.

I think that my first post once I’m actually, you know, awake should be a real introduction post like I did in 2015 when I started this blog and then once I finish it and polish it and whatever, I should take Facebook up on the credit that they’re always offering me to promote that post. And if there’s no offer like that now, I guess I’ll wait until there is an offer like that.

It kind of sucks that the first day of the first year in a long time that I’m really putting the effort in on NaNoWriMo I have to work. It’s a short-ish day, though, starting at 10 am and ending at 6 pm. I’ll have to throw together post 2 of 8 during breakfast. Unless I oversleep, in which case I’ll just have to punt.

I should probably try auditioning some more speech-to-text apps. Then I can write while I drive when I need to. I guess that would count as writing, right?

Ack! I just realized that if I’m going to write 240 posts, I need 240 photos and 240 Gratuitous Amazon Links. Maybe I can press my Goodreads account into service here. I’ve shelved 270 books and I’m still digging more out of my subconscious. Maybe I can post 240 of them in reverse chronological order by date written. Well, kind of a hybrid chronological order would be better, I guess. The book that I just finished last night was Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger. The one before that was Tower of Nero, which relies on things learned in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the Heroes of Olympus and the first four Trials of Apollo books and skipping those would be counterproductive.

On the other hand, the posts aren’t going to be read in any particular order, so would it really matter which order I post the books in? I don’t know. It’s almost 12:30 am and I’m not thinking really well at the moment.

This would mean, of course, that the very oldest book I’ve ever read (right now the oldest books I have there are the first three Nancy Drew mysteries) would never be a Gratuitous Amazon Link this month.

Thinking of my Goodreads account, I just realized that I’m really far behind on updating them. I just took a break to update. And so now my Read shelf has 274 books on it and so now I have a bunch of Gratuitous Amazon Links lined up, but not anything like 240.

First up, the most recent book I’ve read, Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger. It was published in 2012, and there are eight more books in the series so we’ll see how this goes. I really enjoyed this book and some not-quite-spoilery things I’ve read make me think that I might enjoy the rest of the series.

Maybe I’ll write about it later today for my first book blogging post for the month.

Now, let’s see how many words I’ve racked up so far.

Word tells me that it’s 592. That’s a respectable number. Not nearly enough for today, but enough before bedtime.