So I hadn’t realized my library card had expired. For someone who considers it a more important ID than a driver’s license, this is significant.

As I was renewing it, I discovered that my library has a “responsible party” signature on cards issued to young readers. And since I’ve been a patron hither and thither since I was much too short to peek over the top of the juvenile fiction stacks, that applies to me. I know the signature is to ensure books get returned, fines get paid, librarians don’t need to sharpen their katanas to save their precious treasure from unworthy hands…it still amuses me that after all this time, I still have a card with that on it.

Not like I’m changing that. I’m more than comfortable with my reputation as the irresponsible Hobbit party.

Why did I find out about this now?

OverDrive.

I didn’t know I could get online library books. This is seriously embarrassing!

Not that it’s unexpected, though. I’d always take a hard copy of a book over any other format if I can get it. Ninety-eight times out of a hundred. There’s something thrilling, almost sacred about going to the library, smelling the books and musty carpet, finding my way to the very back of the stacks where it’s almost too dark to read the titles on the spines–why would I want to skip all that?

But in light that I haven’t been able to visit my library in a ridiculously heart-wrenching long time because plague…

The discovery is revolutionizing.

More books. I’m ridiculously excited. It feels like I can breathe again. No, it’s more like I’ve been a little bird pecking at cage bars and now the wind’s under my wings like a great, welcoming heartbeat.

Forgive the poetics. I was getting really homesick.

And this probably would be the shortest library trip in the history of my life if I were actually going in the flesh…checking out only one book.

Weird. But I wanted to make sure I understood how the eBook system worked before I went completely nuts grabbing all the books.

I’ll be back.

Other things?

Just sent off another entry to Writers of the Future. Urban fantasy. Lots of wizards. Too much gorgeous detail describing ordinary things. Fight scenes are probably a mess. Narrator who could be bleeding out from a stab wound and only respond with “This is inconvenient”–which, by the way, makes it so much harder to scare your reader because they’re lulled into thinking everything is fine. Characters I know better than I know myself. I hate it. I love it. It’s submitted now so I get to wait on average 3 months to find out if some of the best SF/F writers in the country loved or hated it too.

It was a hard story to write. I like wizards that are still grounded in the real world, with physical (and mental and emotional) struggles magic can’t always fix.

Combine that with the fact that I all but inhabit my characters to write them, try to feel everything they feel to make it genuine…it’s been a rough last few weeks.

Getting away from that, I’ve returned to my favorite fluff fantasy series. One I’ve been working on intermittently since the summer I was fifteen. Started as an afternoon of fun, grew into a trilogy of novellas, and now I might have five underfed books coming out of it.

Also need to learn a pile of vocabulary about medieval seafaring. Because only Vizzini of The Princess Bride gets away with yelling “Move the thing! The other thing!”