June: Month Of The DNF

Lately, I’ve been doing more of a month end followup with a listing of books I’d recommend from the month rather than packing the month with reviews. Not for June.

June kind of crystallized why I’ve been changing all of my book blogging and reviewing habits lately, including stepping down from the staff position at Envie! Magazine. Something is shifting for me.

Last month, I had 6 DNFs. That is more books in one month I didn’t finish than in the entirety of 2018 and almost half of my total for last year. In one month. And I’ve already added one to that so far in July and we are only on day 3.

What I did read and finish, I mostly wasn’t loving. They weren’t awful, but I just wasn’t as into them as I thought I’d be. Including books from authors I’d thoroughly enjoyed in the past. I found that new peeves are peaking their heads out and partying with my old peeves, making a nasty mess of an awful lot of books lately.

Apparently, I just need something different from my reading. Something I’m not getting and, at the moment, don’t even know what that something is. It is frustrating beyond belief. At the same time, I’m not looking at it as an entirely bad thing.

I know that a portion of that (only a small portion) is feeling a bit burned out at the “required” part of reading that I was starting to feel. Between having to have a review every month for the magazine (a positive review, mind you), the deadlines to get any NetGalley reviews completed and the personal push to post reviews on the majority of books I read, I over did it. And it’s not the first time. You’d have thought I learned the last time.

I needed the reminder and that is why I don’t see this weird state as so much a bad thing as it is an opportunity for me to shift my focus. I need to get back to why I was writing about books in the first place, writing about them because I felt like I actually had something to say, good or bad, and not just writing about a book because I read it.

One thing I’ve learned along the way is that as cool as it is to get books ahead of release day via NetGalley, I’d much rather have the official version rather than the not-always-clean ARC version. That peeve about not great editing or mistakes is amplified when you combine it with imperfect or non-existent formatting (definitely not all books from there are this way, but many have been). It makes it really hard to look past sometimes and just get to the story. And that is ultimately all I’m really after anyway, the story.

The other piece to this is when I get like this, not feeling all that satisfied with the books I’m reading, something else seems to spike in its place. It seems like this time it is going to be the drive to be really creative, in a number of ways. The photos are absolutely still a huge focus, but I want to try and dig a little deeper into them. I’ve also really been loving spending a lot of my time in my studio, whether it has been working on the masks or any number of smaller, “fix it” kind of projects.

Hubby and I have talked about actually finishing out that space. The lighting is atrocious. Any effort to rectify that will require a lot of other kinds of work, so might as well go all the way. With that in mind, I’ve been brainstorming what my ideal craft room/studio space would actually look like rather than a couple of random, crappy free standing cabinets on bare concrete floors and walls with an equally crappy folding table with probably a dozen storage bins in different locations across the basement holding all the various different bits of fabrics, yarn, and I’ve forgotten what all else that didn’t make it into said cabinets. The only really great thing I have in there is my workbench, which creates all kinds of other difficulties.

All that just means that I’m going through a shift. Where all the crafty, creative stuff has taken a backseat to the books the last few years, it may be going the other way for a while. I’m still not sure.

I want to spend some time trying to come up with a plan for my studio that is doable without being too much. Enough that I don’t feel like I have to put protective sheets over every surface to keep the cat hair, dust and pesky multi-legged creatures out of my space and make it more functional and appealing to spend time in. I want to spend more time there doing the creative bits and not the clearing things off so I can work bits, or the hunting down the materials bits.

I want to do that and still read, but I’m needing to rebalance my time. All those DNFs just managed to drive it home that it’s past time. I have a list of projects I want to work on or that I’ve considered. As soon as I get through recital next week, assuming I survive the stress, I’m going to start working on prioritizing and planning. And, hopefully, getting creative.