Over the past month or so, in between frantic short story writing to keep pace with my amazing Shakey Writers group I’ve been working on setting up my writing space. For the first time in my life, I have more shelves than books, so the notion of how to shelve my books suddenly began to seem more important. Do I go with the idea put forward by a friend interested in design and shelve my books by colour? Not likely. Likewise alphabetically by author didn’t hold a lot of appeal.
So then I started thinking about what makes each book in my current shelf a keeper. Why is it here when so many others have been traded or given away, it’s contents imprinted on my mind, but not so present in my life I felt the need to keep a copy. I tend to think great books are a kind of portal, ready to take me back to a world or part of a world that I loved, and felt the need to return to once in a while.
In that vein, I’ve started to put together shelves that have the type of journey or story in common. Action and horror share a space, for the adrenaline boost they provide, either from staying ahead of the curve or at least outrunning the danger at hand. A Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelf for those journeys into another world, where very human issues manifest themselves in a manner we may not have considered before. There’s so many options, I’m still making up my mind. Hopefully I get there one day.
On that note, I was very happy to receive my Never Never Book box in the mail last week. Every couple of months the crew at NNBB put together a themed box of bookish goodies, and these things live in my writing space to both inspire and distract me in equal measure. This months theme was ‘Not Trustworthy’, and I can’t wait to start reading! What’s on your bookshelf or tbr that you can’t wait to read?
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