Feeling Bookish

I should be sleeping, especially since I am fighting some sort of chest cold thing, but I can't. I feel like writing...and it's a good feeling. I could also be excited that Poodle is coming tomorrow to spend the weekend. It will be fun to hang out and chat and shop and be around someone who gets me the way Cat gets me. Oh my God, Poodle and Cat...my closest friends sound like some sort of menagerie! Apologies to both.

I have a huge stack of books on my nightstand. Twenty-seven books to be exact. I'm trying to read three at once (see the What I'm Reading sidebar) and it's not as hard as I thought it would be, although it's early in the process so we'll see how I'm fairing in another week. Of the three, I'd say my fave is Fifteen Candles. The stories really take me back to that time in my life and I am enjoying remembering things about being a teen that I hadn't thought about in years. The Tender Bar is pretty good so far, I'm curious to find out what happens to the author as he gets older. Women's Letters is a wee bit daunting because it starts during the Revolutionary War and I'm struggling to wrap my head around some of what I'm reading. I might wait until I finish one of the other two in order to really get into Women's Letters. Any minute now I expect to get three or four magazines in the mail, so that, along with all my lovely new books, should get me through those cold winter nights. Bring on the snow, I've got enough reading material to get me through til spring!

I realize that the three books I am reading are all non-fiction and/or biographical in some way. I've been doing more of that since I started the blog, leaning toward memoirs and the like. Maybe I'm looking for inspiration in these true stories in order to write my own. Or maybe I'm not feeling the chick-lit vibe. I'm sort of living one of those single-gal-trying-to-sort-her-life-out books right now, only without the madcap adventures, sexy rendezvous and closet full of fabulous shoes ( I do, however, have the hilarious and endlessly lovable friends part down pat), so why read about it too?

The Wests sent me a funny little book called the Writer's Block (ha ha). It's chock full of writing prompts. I moved it from the desk to my nightstand for the sake of not being able to say "oh I should do a writing exercise before bed, but the book with the prompts is in the other room..." It's next to my notebook, so I have the tools at hand. Now do I have the nerve?