Do You Have Enough Reading Time?

“How did it get so late so soon?” ~ Dr. Seuss

Somehow, Wednesday keeps sneaking past me and here it is Thursday already. The days can slide past but only minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day as it always has. Must be something about having the blessing of experiencing a lot of those minutes and hours and days. You know, getting older and having so many memories piling up to clutter the mind and make one forget, oh yeah, yesterday was when I normally post something on One Writer’s Journal.

It’s good that many of you readers are patient and understanding and don’t mind reading on Thursday what sometimes you read on Wednesday.

Maybe it was because I went out to the garden late yesterday afternoon and picked a few beans. My beans aren’t doing well this year. Lots of vines and leaves.  Not many beans. And the wind the other night flattened a lot of the corn that was looking so good last week although we were expecting raccoons to show up and destroy it the way they usually do when it gets ready to pick. They always come a day or two before it’s big enough to pick.

But really, I can make excuses, but alas, the day just slipped past. Does that ever happen to you?

This quote of Henry David Thoreau always makes me think and sometimes feel like the ants. “It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”

But then aren’t ants those insects we always think of being industrious while the grasshopper plays all summer?

Maybe I was more the grasshopper yesterday, just enjoying the sunny day. But since I’m talking about time and how it can slip past with me busy at who knows what, it’s a good time to answer the question Kris asked when I invited you all to ask something you might ask if you were at one of my book talk.

Kris asked, “My question is- do you have time to read other books since you are so busy working on your own?”

The answer is that I don’t have as much time to read as I’d like, but then maybe none of us do. So many great books are out there that I would like to read. I have a big stack of want to read books and I come across more that I’d like to add to my stack every week.

I do try to keep reading while I’m writing. Of course, I almost always do some research reading while I’m coming up with new story ideas. That reading about the history, the time period, perhaps a character’s occupation, or the setting helps me get a better feel for what might happen and how my characters might look, think, or act. But I’m not sure that counts when we are talking about reading for entertainment and joy as I assume Kris means in her question.

I do have to be careful about what I read while I’m actually writing my story. It can’t be a book too much like my own story. It can’t deal with the same history I’m trying to include in my story. I have to keep my focus on the story I’m writing.

I really enjoy listening to audio books while I’m doing chores around the house, but I have to be very careful about which books I listen to if I’m actually writing my books. A narrator’s voice can get stuck in my head until my characters are talking like the characters in the audio book. That’s especially troubling if the narrator has a wonderful British or other foreign accent. Since I’m usually writing about country people or mountain people, they need to speak in their own voices and not voices from another place and time.

I do love to read. And a writer needs to read to get those words in her head. Reading helps fill up that creative well inside me where ideas swirl and rise up to help me find words to share my stories.

Usually, when I finish a book and send it off to my editor, I give myself the gift of some extra time to read while I ponder my next idea for a story.

What I really need is an extra day a week to read at least some of those books calling me.

How about you? Do you have as much time to read as you would like? 

A preacher we used to have would remind us if we said we didn’t have time to do something that we all had the same number of minutes in each day. It was how we chose to use those minutes that mattered. And I guess he was right even if it sometimes seemed, as his wife insisted, that he didn’t take into account those chores or work that had to be done everyday.

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” – C.S. Lewis.