Today I woke and it was 4 degrees. That’s cold for Australia so I made the rational decision not to get out of bed, after running through my timetable for the day. Did I have time to huddle under the covers for another hour? Yes, yes I did.

I put one hand out far enough to read on my phone. I downloaded a sample of Reflections, a compilation of the writings of Dianna Wynn Jones on her creative process. She wrote Howl’s Moving castle (and forty other books.) **

Later, while I ate lunch I watched a YouTube lecture from Susan Cooper; a contemporary of Jones. $$

She wrote the Dark is Rising sequence (and thirty other books). She described growing up in WWII and she said the bombs that brought the war to an end were dropped by the Light, not the Dark.

Indeed.

Besides me being interested in how each writer got their ideas, both women are linked by their attendance at Oxford where their world collided with both CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

Cooper remembers that Tolkien mumbled; mumbled in English but spoke clearly in Norse. He declaimed Beowulf; shouted it, and made all the students in the lecture sit up straighter.

The idea for her famous fantasy started when she saw a thousand pound prize was offered for a family adventure story. It was more than she earnt in a year as a reporter. Once Uncle Merriman had made an appearance, she forgot about the competition and just wrote the story.

It took her ten years to understand there were more books she hadn’t written yet in the series.

She laughed as she recounted how readers always told her that they saw themselves as Will in the second book.

At the 41:29 mark of the lecture she finished with this:

Whatever may be going on in the real world, fantasy takes you back to the universal, the things that don’t change; the things that are at heart. The mystery. It’s a window onto truth as beautiful as that moon; as bright as that sun.

And it will always be there no matter what. All you have to do is look and read.

My copy of the Dark is Rising is a combined paperback and is falling apart. I read it aloud to my children. The first book is Over Sea, Under Stone and features the three Drew children.

Maybe it’s time for a re-read.

 

**Note to self: buy ALL those books

$$ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Qf7NnL2h8&t=0s&index=36&list=WL

Last month I helped my friend move house.

I went over on the last day to pack boxes, provide moral support, egg her on to keep going, and to run stuff up and down the stairs to its various destinations; pack, trash, or give away. I loaded up my car and dropped bags off at the local charity shop.

And lucky for me I was the recipient of a few things put aside for me. She paid me in sheet sets, hair clips and books.

Yes, she knows me well.

It’s pretty much on brand.

Now to catalogue and shelve all the books *rubs hands*

I like counting. I always have. ##

So I like keeping track of my books. But that’s kind of hard when buying ebooks is so easy and you don’t have a physical cover to remind you that the book exists, and yes, you have a copy in your ebook library reader of choice but it’s kind of not the same. I hate accidentally buying a book I already own in a different format. I had a Book database but the software went cloud based and started charging monthly fees so I started looking for some other way to record my titles.

I messed about with Calibre this year and it works well to load in titles IF you have a file copy in your computer. I hear, also that it’s good for making and editing ebooks. I haven’t got to that stage yet. But so far, it’s working.

But… a lot of my books are on Amazon. I like the one click buy thing. My bank account really doesn’t. I have avoided Kobo for a long time because I have endless issues with getting their Windows app reader to function. It just… doesn’t. And their phone app is buggy, too.** I do not yet own a Kobo reader and maybe those problems are less obvious with one? Idk.

And the app cannot synch across all platforms so my phone doesn’t know what I’m reading and I have to download and upload titles into the PC app. It’s annoying.

Compared to Amazon? Where the app and the PC ereader synch up, AND it also synchs audiobooks with ebooks via a trademarked process, whispersynch; Kobo looks pretty bad. But it does have a wishlist. Take that, Amazon.

Plus, when you buy a title on Kobo it takes six steps to buy it, not one. Amazon actually copyrighted the one button buy thingie. And in Australia, Kobo is often way more expensive. Up to double the price. Wails… why?!

Amazon works on a Mobi file format and I own a few of those, too. I’ve downloaded them as giveaways from Author websites, or purchased them in Kickstarters or Humble Bundles or things like that. Calibre can load those files as well… but.

And it’s here we come to the eternal problem of Digital Rights Management or DRM. I don’t like it. I find it truly annoying that I do not actually OWN a title I bought on Amazon. What I own is a license to read that title in, and on, their format. [That’s probably how whispersynch works, right?] So 2,656 of my purchased books are not really mine. *jaw clenches* what if it all goes wrong? ^^

I also hate the idea that I don’t know what that DRM does. I’ve given the example before but imagine you buy a chair that lets you sit on it … say 25 times and then it breaks into pieces and cannot be reassembled and used as a chair. That chair has DRM.

I am also pretty law abiding. Yes, I could load some software and strip the DRM from those files… but that would be illegal. *cue hand flapping panic*

So I am attempting to match my Kobo and Kindle libraries using a spreadsheet and then going to check if the amazon title is still available on Kobo and replicating it there. So my Kobo library is mushrooming.

This makes me happy. &&

 

## how did I NOT know I had ADHD?

**it keeps incorrectly saving my last read position. No, god dammit, I am NOT at ch 3. I’m up to ch18! For the third time… you get the idea. I want to read a book, not search for the last bit I read.

^^ I’m a writer; my entire existence is asking ‘what if’…

&& You didn’t really think any of solution I came up with was going to involve LESS books, did you? *grins*

Oh my god… I broke Kindle again. While I was downloading and making a list of all my Amazon titles, I noticed there were a few updates listed. Somehow when I’ve clicked that upload box, it has given me TWO copies. But which ONE do I delete? Aaagh