Patti O'Shea's Blog

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago I used to read a book a day. I’d start the book at lunch time at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) and then pick it up again when I arrived home. If I stayed up too late and went to work tired the next day, it was because I had a longer book that I couldn’t finish before it was time to go to bed and I couldn’t put it down.

Way back in this time frame, I used to take week-long vacations to a cabin in Wisconsin and I would bring an enormous bag of books with me and spend all day reading. On these vacations, there’d be days where I’d read four, even five books from the time I woke up until I went to sleep. It was nirvana.

I used to be able to answer all kinds of questions about books that any romance reader on any board had. After all, I’d probably already read the story. (Unless it was historical. I gave up reading historicals when month after month they sat in my To Be Read (TBR) pile while I finished all the contemporary romances and paranormals.) If anyone was trying to come up with the title of a book that they’d read and couldn’t remember, I probably knew it.

You might have guessed that while I was reading like this, I wasn’t exactly spending a lot of time writing. You’d be correct. I wrote on Sundays. Sometimes. And for the 2.5 years before I started Ravyn’s Flight, I hadn’t written at all. (I think of this as preparation time, BTW, and not wasted years. I spent a lot of it working on becoming a better balanced, more grounded human being, something that’s helped enormously in the roller coaster world of publishing.)

And then a friend of mine got me interested in writing again. It came back slowly–a poem here, a short story there, but then one day I was driving home from the EDJ and I saw Ravyn huddled on the floor and I knew something bad had happened. I just didn’t know what and I had to write to find out. Then I had to write to learn the rest of the story and get to the end. I was dying of curiosity. Despite this, though, I still spent a lot of time reading. I devoured books–and I like to think, learned from each book I read.

Then I sold Ravyn’s Flight and things changed. I couldn’t take 18 months to write a book any longer. I learned to write during my lunch hour instead of read and I wrote when I got home. With a four-month deadline for my second contracted book, if I came into work exhausted the next day, it was because I’d stayed up too late getting my page count in.

The time between deadlines was spent on proposals for other books or on gardening or my website or promotion or a dozen other things that piled up. Reading became a luxury.

For the month of November, I finished one book and that was because I’d listened to it on my iPod while I worked on a project at the EDJ. I have a lot of books I want to read. Books by friends of mine. Books by acquaintances who bought one of my books and took the time to tell me they enjoyed it. Books that I’ve heard good things about from other people that I trust. And they all sit, waiting for me to find time to read them. I’m trying to think of the last book I actually read and not listened to, and it’s been so long, I can’t even come up with a title. That’s sad.

And don’t even get me started about the pile of magazines that I don’t have time to read. Maybe after the current WIP is finished.