Tour of bookshelves

I had a busy weekend. There was:
— grocery shopping
— a three-hour phone call with cousin Mike about my script
— hours and hours of writing – I probably wrote for 8 hours, all told, over the weekend
— then, somehow, miraculously, in the middle of all of this, I decided to organize my bookshelves

Since the party when my friends basically came over and set up the apartment of their debilitated friend, and everyone tackled the 30 boxes of books that had sat against the wall since I moved in on July 1, I have done nothing with the books. I am focusing on healing. Trying to keep moving forward. Cauterizing the wound. Not much time left over for homemaking. The first step was to get those books out of the damn boxes, and my awesome posse handled that at my party. People set up a chain, and passed the books up to Kerry, on a chair. I had decided to not worry about order at this point. The priority was to get those books unloaded. Poetry next to radical Islam, I didn’t care. Lauren Bacall next to self-help. Didn’t matter. So since then …

Well. I am operating under a deficit of energy right now. There is an anvil on me. I don’t walk up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ready to tackle the day. It’s hard for me. It’s been hard for me. So my books have stayed in the random order from the barn-raising. Which isn’t really a problem, right now, since I’m not reading.

But for whatever reason, I suddenly just STARTED on Saturday. What it required was EXTENSIVE, and I went at it methodically, slowly, tolerating the chaos, knowing that eventually it would be over. The good thing about it was there was a CLEAR point of no return, which I really need. It was a daunting task. I had to take ALL the books out of the shelves. Organize them into piles on the floor – because the books had been put away any which way, it was impossible to find anything, so I set them up on the floor in ever-growing piles, leaving the worrying about alphabetization and Dewey Decimal organization for later. For now, I had to locate ALL my true crime books and gather them together. I had to locate ALL my scripts and put them in the same area. Etc. The piles grew over the weekend, flowing out of the study into my kitchen. My kitchen was filled with piles of books. If anyone had looked at my apartment it would have looked INSANE, but it was crazily organized to my eyes. It just happened that the bookshelves were now empty and all the books were on the floor, but I knew where the biographies were, where the history was, where the young adult stuff was – I knew exactly what each pile signified. It’s not like I could re-organize shelf by shelf, because there was NO organization, and I have over 3,000 books. Everything had to come out.

Because my shelves are now too high for me to reach the top two shelves (glorious) I had to give some thought to how I wanted to place my books. I didn’t want, say, my founding fathers biographies on those top two shelves, because I dip into those all the time for my blog and my other writing, My entertainment biographies, too. They all had to be easy access.

So I came up with a plan, that – well, it may end up not working out – but it’s too late now! I plotted it out, which books should go where, calculating what each shelf could hold, and the likelihood that I would need to look in said book on any kind of regular basis.

My mother bought me a little step ladder, so of course I can get any book I want, if necessary, but comfort and convenience is key.

That was Saturday. All the books came out.

I took breaks, to talk with Mike for hours, taking notes. Then I wrote until 3 in the morning. Woke up at 7 a.m. on Sunday, and wrote for another five hours. Surrounded by UTTER CHAOS, piles and piles of books, with thin corridors through them for me to walk through.

Oh, and I fell on Saturday. It was a cataclysmic event and I am sure I frightened my neighbors. I have bruises everywhere now. I had a stack of books in my hand, and I was headed to the corner where the “events” books were (I’ll get to that in a minute – my genres are, shall we say, specific!) – there were tiny curving thin corridors between the books on the floor I needed to make my way through, through the precariously piled stacks of books. I lost my footing, and down I went. It was an event that could not be stopped. A chain reaction occurred. I could not recover. I tried to, but down I went. The stack of books I was holding went flying in a million directions, and of course wherever they landed, they knocked down an existing stack of books. And then there was my fall. I fell across Fiction and Biography, plowing into the stacks like an avalanche. Six piles of books were obliterated, Maud Gonne toppling into Margaret Atwood, and it took me an hour to undo the damage.

Hope has not recovered emotionally from the entire weekend.

I wrote all night in a fever on Saturday. Woke up, made coffee, wrote for hours more.

Then basically just STARTED and put all the books away. It took me hours.

But like I said, once I passed the point of no return (“I think we’ve just passed it”), there was no going back. Once I had piles of books filling two rooms completely (not exaggerating) I knew that this was an unlivable situation. I dug deep, and found the moral fortitude to complete my task.

So let’s take a tour of my bookshelves, shall we?