Up To My Neck

Ever find that you’ve bitten off much more than you can chew, and you sit there wondering what the hell you can do about it? That was my day.

Thursday night I few back home after a four month trip to China, Thailand and Vietnam. During my travels, I managed to get some work done on my work-in-progress novel and two screenplays. I also managed to get a lot of reading done and reviewed several fine books. I still had four or five books to review, but that’s not too much to get excited about.

But then my next-door neighbor paid a visit. While I was away, every time someone delivered a box of books, he took them. Authors and publishers have sent me dozens of books to review. Some I asked for and some I didn’t. Now, instead of the five books to review that I knew about, I have twenty-five books to review.

It generally takes me one to two weeks to carefully read and review a book. That means I have six to ten months of work ahead of me. The good news is that there are some excellent books on the list that I want to read. The bad news is that I didn’t want to work that hard. I wanted to concentrate on my writing, not reviewing other writers.

So it’s been a somewhat depressing day. I did manage to log them all and prioritize them. Maybe I should look into a speed reading course?