Hello, friends! I am in the midst of a massive writing block at the moment. I can’t seem to write about a book to save my life. I have a few books I want to tell you about, but every time I sit down to post about them my little brain just freezes right up. I think it’s a combination of anxiety and exhaustion. I usually write in the evenings, after work, and sometimes I have nothing left to give after working with the public all day. I am hoping this passes quickly, but I am prepared to force myself through it – sometimes that is the only strategy that works.
At the same time, I have hit a slump in my reading. For a few months I was reading one book after another with total and complete enjoyment, relishing every novel that I picked up and not regretting a page. Lately, I have struggled to finish a couple of books that I thought I would savor and have picked up half a dozen books that just fell flat. In the spring I started scheduling my reading. Do you do this? I tend to flit from book to book, starting many and finishing few, so I decided to impose order on my reading life and made a schedule of what I was going to read through December. This plan worked really well throughout the summer, but as the evenings are coming earlier and the weather is cooling down I tend to get sucked into tv shows (NCIS or Law & Order: SVU marathons get me every time) and can’t muster the enthusiasm for novels.
In desperation I’ve decided to abandon my reading schedule and go back to reading by whim. I’m going to let my mind give up the goals I had set for my fall reading and read whatever feels good at the moment. For now the Victorians feel right. They’ve been summoning me for a few weeks now and I am finally going to answer their call. I started The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins last night and have bought copies of Agnes Grey, Far From the Madding Crowd and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to have on hand for this fall and winter.
I’m really loving The Moonstone so I think it was just what I needed to revive my reading life. Do you ever suffer from writer’s block? Reading slumps? Do you have any strategies for dealing with them that you can share with us?
A Certain Fondness 
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