In the Middle of Everything

Still doing NaNoWriMo, but feeling less frenzied.  One thing about this experience: I sleep soundly at night.  After I empty out all my words, I fall into bed (onto futon, to be exact) at midnight or one a.m, read for ten minutes, conk out and I don't know a thing until the alarm goes off at 8:02 the next morning.  After this is over, maybe I should keep a novel on the go all the time.  Nah.

Predictably, my reading has taken a hit.  I'm now in the middle of six books, and can't seem to finish a single one.  I just drift like a tumbleweed from book to book to book then stall.  The list includes:

1. Insomnia - Stephen King.  I'm mad at myself for this.  I should be reading King.  I would absorb his aversion to adverbs by osmosis.

2. Van Gogh biography.  He was driving me absolutely nuts, so what did I do??  I picked up...

3. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. She spends pages and pages and pages castigating herself for her writer's block.  It was too much of an echo of my own life these days.  I got that Van Gogh feeling, but pressed on. She really annoyed me when she dealt with her writer's block by breezing through three or four Henry James novels in a week while working full-time teaching at Smith.  I liked her dream about meeting Marilyn Monroe, though and how so much of her journal ends up in The Bell Jar, but still. Had to give up.

4. The Slaves of Solitude - Patrick Hamilton.  I don't know.  I love post WWII fiction, I love England, I love Hamilton, I love his prose -- but I froze up and couldn't finish.

5. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing - Marie Kondo.  This is my current subway read.  I wish I could hire Kondo to fly from Tokyo to Busan and we could sort out my possessions "in one go", as she blithely puts it. I could use someone to hold my hand during this process.  Now that I just wrote that sentence, I'm annoyed with myself for writing it. Aren't I an International Woman of Mystery?  Pooh.  A true IWOM would never have picked up so much stuff in the first place.

Finally, I had a dream that all my book blogging buddies -- The Relentless Reader, Bookfool, Sam from Book Chase, Michelle from A Reader's Respite, Susan from You Can Never Have Too Many Books, Susan from Pages Turned, Sandy from You've Gotta Read This! and Unruly Reader -- got together and came to Korea to visit me.  Except they got the wrong city.  They came to Gumi instead of Busan, then they realized their mistake and headed towards Seoul!  NO!!!  I had just caught up with them as the dream ended.  Wondering what it means.