With projects popping up and fizzing out almost daily (a big translation job just vanished, leaving me in the red for the winter) and stress levels rising, I decided to take a stress-free two-days, putting some order on my bookshelves.

My books have a tendency to accumulate like driftwood on a beach.
There’s the big tome on the occult I had to check for a RE:CON job, that’s now sitting on top of The Colonial Wars Sourcebook and India: A Cultural Atlas I used for some bits in Hope & Glory. That’s why all three books are bundled with the Savage World Deluxe handbook, and occupy a chair together with a stack of hardback novels, Chambers’ London Gazetteer and The Starflight Handbook.
And what of the cobweb-wrapped pile of volumes on the window-sill in the corridor upstairs, which includes a book on grave-robbing, a high-school textbook on earth sciences and The Time-traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England?
A mess.

So I sat with a carafe of cold tea, and I started separating the books into more rational stacks, and then to place them on their shelves. Continue reading →