What’s on My Shelf?

This week my accountability group is blogging about what our bookshelves are like and which authors have influenced us. Last week’s post on Hobbies is also part of our How I Write series.

My husband and I are bona fide bibliophiles. Movers hate us because we have so many books. We just lost a large built-in shelf at the old house last Spring, so we’re in the process of converting the majority of our shelving into double-stacked shelves where you can read both spines. We bought 4×4′s at Home Depot and had them cut to length. Not the prettiest in some places, but functional and needed.

Photo of a crazy bookshelf house. No walls, just shelves.
We so need a house like this!

I think we’d be quite happy with a house like the one on the right (BTW – You can click on any of the images to enlarge them!). As it is, we have covered 2 windows with bookshelves and turned the common wall of the dining room and family room into one long shelf unit for books, movies and games. We keep joking that we need to find a library branch that’s closing and tell them don’t move anything, we’ll just move in around the existing shelves and books. Needless to say, after a couple of moves, we’re tired of not being able to put our hands on a book easily. We have roughly 76 – 40″ shelves and 45 – 20″ shelves full. This works out to 3940 linear inches or 328 linear feet of books! No. We have no idea how many individual books that comes to.

A photo of my Historical Romance Shelf
Historical Romance Shelf

But let’s take a closer look at my romance shelves. These I have separated out and organized. I’ve put all my Historical Romances which are set mostly during the Regency on a 40″ bookcase. If we wanted to name favorite authors, there are quite a few: Victoria Alexander, Mary Balogh, Shirlee Busbee, Suzanne Enoch, Galen Foley, Karen Hawkins, Eloisa James, Sabrina Jeffries, Lisa Kleypas, Stephanie Laurens, Amanda Quick, and Julia Quinn. I’ve also picked up some new favorites: Tessa Dare, Anna Campbell, Joanna Bourne, and Anne Gracie.

I love authors with big sprawling series like JQ’s Bridgertons, SL’s Cynsters and Enoch’s books which have a few token characters who return on the fringes book after book. Love the inter-connectedness that makes it feel like a coherent society.

A photo of my Contemporary & Paranormal Shelf
Contemporary & Paranormal Shelf

The Contemporary Romance & Paranormal Romance books are on a 20″ bookcase. Janet Evanovich amuses me, both with her old contemporary romances — it’s fun to see where she was practicing with certain characters — and the Stephanie Plum series. I’m so not sold on who they picked for Ranger in the movie either. Anyway…my other go to authors for contemporary are Suzanne Brockmann, Jennifer Crusie and Louisa Edwards.

For some reason, all my Lynn Kurland time-travel books seem to be on the historical shelf, instead of with the contemporary/paranormal ones. I think this is because they scream historical to me even if the couple ends up in modern times at the end of the book. I know where to look for them anyway.

I also read a lot of YA in hopes of getting my daughter interested in ones beyond what’s just wildly popular (She hated Twilight, LOVED Hunger Games) and I’ve had limited success with that since she’s crazy into anime and manga. On the other hand, I’ve had great success in finding fun and entertaining authors for myself like Rosemary Clement-Moore and Tera Lynn Childs. DH is the one who reads SF/F so has introduced us to Cory Doctorow (Little Brother) and Scott Westerfeld (The Midnighters Series, Pretties/Uglies/Specials and Leviathan/Behemoth/Goliath) and he’s had some success in getting me and our son to read them. The boy is happily reading a string of 19th century stories and novels like Frankenstein. Don’t think I can sell him on Jane Austen though.

My "To Be Read" Shelf
My TBR Stack: Can you spot the duplicate?

I’m also falling behind in my reading. While I was tracking on GoodReads, I was reading about 2-3 books a week. I should go back to doing that again, it was fun to see everything back-to-back in a list like that. But from this shelf, the proportions are fairly well represented: mostly Regency set historicals, 3 other. What you can’t see behind there are craft books (read) and some reference books (most read).

I hope you enjoyed this little tour of my books.

YOUR TURN: Who are your favorite authors? What do you recommend that I add to my TBR pile now that you’ve seen what I like?

And if you’d like to read about what the rest of my group does when they’re not writing, you can find their blogs here:

* Alexia Reed * Angeleque Ford * Danie Ford *
* Emma G. Delaney * Kimberly Farris *

When I’m Not Writing…

Leaf with Heavy DewThis week my accountability group is blogging about our hobbies and what we do when we’re not writing. Last week’s post on Writer’s Block is also part of our How I Write series.

Some days I don’t think I have time for hobbies. But then I remember just how much I spend reading. Mostly Science Fiction, Fantasy, YA, Historical Romance and some contemporary and paranormal romance as well. We need more bookshelves but don’t have room for them.

I have a bunch of other hobbies that I enjoy puttering around with, but am not very serious about: cooking, gardening, sewing. None of those ever felt like something I was passionate about enough to pursue in any real sense.

I like to cook and bake, but it’s more of a way to share with family and friends. I’d judge myself a competent if sometimes uninspired cook. Gardening, I’ve posted a lot of pictures lately about it, but the plants either live or not. I’m enjoying the process, but I’m not tied to it.

I learned to sew in 7th grade for a home-ec class. Picked a fairly difficult pattern and beat it before it defeated me. When my daughter was a toddler, I made many of her dresses. I even made a pair of overalls for my son with an adorable cow print. The most ambitious project I took on was my daughter’s colonial costume for 5th grade. I know where the flaws are and I beat myself up about them, but it came out pretty well. But again, competent but not passionate.

I’ve always been a gamer. I’m a sucker for a puzzle that needs solving. I managed to work two years as a professional game designer and ran an online text adventure game based on world history and mythology for over ten years. In some ways, I was TOO passionate about that one. Again, I was competent, but I could see more than I was able to implement or direct. So now, I just play and complain to DH who’s still doing it for a living. Hey, he gets a free sounding board!

The other hobby that I keep coming back to and seems to run in my family is photography. My great-grandfather was an art collector. My grandfather was a professional photographer in the ’30s and always seemed to have a camera at hand. My father seemed to collect cameras and my mom still has a kazillion and three boxes of slides in her hall closet. One of my cousins has also been bitten by the shutter bug and I’m astounded by the stuff he comes up with.

I asked for and got a SLR camera as a high school graduation present. Before then, I’d had dinky little box cameras, and even a disc camera. But I wanted a REAL camera. That thing was HEAVY. I drug it all over the place. I even got additional lenses for it. I spent hours setting up “art shots”. I took pictures of the people around me. I loved taking pictures of cityscapes and landscapes.

But when I graduated from college and got married, for some reason, I decided it was too heavy and cumbersome and what we needed was one of those little idiot proof cameras. Yep. Pretty much killed my desire to take pictures. Oh, we’ve got the requisite pictures of the kids when they were little, but not much else. At least from my point of view. DH takes a camera with him when he travels and he’s got some gorgeous ones to show for it.

AnDew Covered Bushyway, I decided this past year, what I wanted for my birthday was a digital SLR camera. It’s so LIGHT! ok. It’s still kinda bulky, but it’s got a lot of bells and whistles I missed with the point and shoots. So I’ve been playing with that just about every week since I got it. Most of the photos I’ve used in the posts lately have been mine. I find that some work, some don’t, but I WANT to learn how to use it better.

I gave in and upgraded my flickr account to PRO because I’d overrun the 200 photo limit for the photostream.

Alexia Reed, Kimberly Farris and I are trying to talk each other into doing a 365 project next year, which because it’s leap year, it’ll actually be 366. I think they’re more convinced than I am, but I think it’ll be a good way to learn my camera and do a bit of local tourism at the same time. There’s got to be a reason I keep coming back to this.

Your Turn: What hobbies do you enjoy?

And if you’d like to read about what the rest of my group does when they’re not writing, you can find their blogs here:

* Alexia Reed * Angeleque Ford * Danie Ford *
* Emma G. Delaney * Kimberly Farris *

Food Porn or Romance?

Food PronI’m an avid reader of Slashfood and am highly amused by their food porn category. DH and I are suckers for any Gordon Ramsay show on tv (Kitchen Nightmares, Hell’s Kitchen or The F-Word). I used to watch a lot of the Food Network back when they were promoting how to cook food instead of just trendy lifestyles. I also skim a variety of other food blogs out there. Bloglines is amazing at pulling everything together in one list for you.

I know my way around the home kitchen, but that’s part of the thrill of watching Ramsey preside over his own little corner of hell. I know I could never hack it there. The pressure is too much for me. Just looking at a well-plated meal can be like looking at a piece of art.

I think that’s why the story idea for the conflict between a food blogger/critic and a chef/restauranteur piqued my interest. The trick will be making it FEEL like you’re looking at Slashfood’s variety of food porn. It’s all in the details.

Before I had to go off an do boring household chores like grocery shopping, I managed to get about 750 words down at the beginning of the story. Before bed last night, I managed to further outline what I wanted to try to accomplish with the story. Unfortunately, I have a lot of non-writing tasks I must finish today before I can go back to playing with food.

Have you ever written about characters with whom you share a hobby or interest? What was the one you’d most like to attempt but have never gotten around to trying?