Tired Katie is Very Tired

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I’ve been trying to get inspirationg from the Writing Cramp prompts on the writing.com website. I did feel good about one of the prompts in the last week or so but then I forgot to “bold” the line they wanted bolded and so my entry was disqualified which made me sad. I get it though. Following the instructions is part of the thing. And for editors and magazines and the like, you usually have to adhere to a pretty strict list of requirements. The “big boys” have so much to sort through that they have to make it easy on themselves to process what they’re looking at and also make sure that those entering are paying attention to the needs of magazine (or whatever) so it makes sense that I would need to practice for the small competitions too. I’m mostly annoyed with myself for forgetting that part. Very annoying. I think my story might have won if I hadn’t have forgotten. It wouldn’t necessarily have won, but I think I had a pretty good shot. The story was perfect but I was pleased with at least half of it, which is a big deal for me. 

Anyway, I checked out the prompt that would be due by noon tomorrow to see what it was. it mentioned how close Christmas is (43 days) and so the prompt was to tell a story about counting down to a holiday, or something like that. It’s the kind of thing that I think aught to be easy for me because of how much I love holidays and countdowns and countdowns to things like holidays and birthdays and vacatations, but it isn’t really sparking anything—something that’s leaving me a little sad actually. It makes me sad because I want to be inspired by the prompts. One of the prompts this week I thought was really dumb, but I can’t begin to imagine trying to come up with fresh prompts for every day of the year for how every many years they’ve been doing this. They probably repeat or do something similar on occasion, but still that is a lot of prompts. Just for a year, that’s a lot of prompts. 

I still wish that would spark something, but I also know I’m sleepy and a little out of it. I worked today and it was an interesting day. The morning was quiet because the library doeesn’t actually open until 1pm, but I go in around 8:30am so that means there are several hours of no patrons in the library. I love it. Sunday might actually be my favorite day to work. I know that probably sounds crazy, but those three or so hours with quiet are just glorious. And because I’m the only person who is assigned to the “Teen Office” who is there on my weekend rotation group, I have the little storage closet turned office all to myself. I can listen to music on my phone and just work in quiet for a while. If I was still getting in at 8am during the week, I’d have a bit of time each morning with no customers, but with holds and some of the other things that need to be done on those days, I still wouldn’t have much time and it would be highly unlikely that I would still have the office to myself. Sharing for the most part is totally fine and I enjoy my coworkers immensely, it’s just that the Sunday mornings are a nice change of pace. 

I was bound and determined that I was going to finish a couple of the books I have had in my “currently reading” bucket for a while and I think I managed to complete them all. It felt good to do so that I could clear them from my ridiculously long “currently reading list” but also because I’m aiming to beat last year’s “pages read” record. Last year it was all about how many books I could read—I made it to 366 which was pretty exciting. A lot of them were picture books and comic books and novellas but I did it nonetheless. I ended up reading more pages than I had in years past (at least so far as goodreads knows) which was a great added bonuses. But this year instead of just trying for a number of books goal, I’ve been going for the “pages read” route. Which means that finishing a few books that I had started to get through but hadn’t quite made it so that I am closer to my goal. I can’t remember, if I’m honest, what page number goal I made for myself. I know I was going to try to guesstimate any fanfiction pages as well. I kept track for all of two months (maybe less) before I had forgotten to record the words and figure out what that would (based on averages) turn out to be pagewise. Which means I really can’t say how much fan-fiction has (or hasn’t really) contributed to how much I’ve read. I really would like to have at least some vague guess about that but I don’t think I could really manage to keep up a record like that. 

Goodreads thankfully tracks my pages for me. I don’t know that I would try to do a page number goal without that key feature. Its nice to think about , but when it comes down to it, recording my number of words read at 1am after finishing a fic and being absolutely ready to pass out isn’t going to happen regularly enough for it to matter. 

My eyes are watering constantly and I keep losing my train of thought when I rub my eyes or yawn, so I’m going to pass out now. Night y’all.