Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

So, I work at a library. One of the perks of that is that I don't have any fines, even if (when) I check books out for months at a time--I do keep an eye on them to see if anyone's put them on reserve, and if they do, I do bring them back, I'm not a complete monster--and so it's extremely easy to just have a million books checked out and just 'getting to them whenever.' Except recently I've been neglecting my own books. I have... a lot of unread books, and when I'm reading six books a week, one would think that would help chip away at the foundation of a few (six hundred+) books lining my walls. Except recently, four of those six have been library books. I love libraries. Not only does my library employ me, but I have a lot of great memories of said library as a child, and that's pretty sweet. But there comes a point where I need to be like, okay, no, I've gotta read my own books now. I can't keep just reading library books, because I hav...

I write most of my novels (okay, all of them, but most of the words in my novels) on the computer. I don't have Scrivener, I don't have any fancy application like Scrivener; I just use Microsoft Word 2016 (or whatever the second-newest one is, I haven't had the motivation to update it). Sometimes when I'm bored, I'll scribble down scenes or openings or, during NaNoWriMo, I'll have a notebook that I'll carry around so that I can continue first drafts even when I'm not at my computer. And while I don't really have a preference for which to use (except that a computer is faster, I can type much faster than I can long-hand), there is something about writing with a pencil and paper. It feels fresher. That might be because I'm used to writing on a computer (TBH, even changing my font size will make writing feel fresher), but I feel like maybe, the slow-down of having to print (well, print and half-cursive. Scrawl. Scrawl is a good word.) does make ...

I'm currently working my way through the rest of the Zeroes trilogy by Scott Westerfeld (+Margo Lanagan, Deborah Biancotti), and while it was a little bit rough to start out, because I read the first book my freshman year of college (so, about three years ago, bleh), and in addition to that, I read the first book so slowly that I didn't even really like it all that much. But recently, I picked up book two from the library, started slow... and then worked the Bookmobile AKA Aurora gets paid to read for six hours, and promptly tore through that one, book three was on the damn bus, so I promptly tore through the first three hundred pages of that one, too. I think there's something to be said about binge-reading a series. If a series is even relatively good, binge-reading it will make me completely engrossed in it--I gave Swarm a full star more than Zeroes, and I don't know that it was, objectively, all that much better. But I do know that I did accept my dumb love for Et...

So, I work at a library. This is not news. My library is currently renovating so, in addition to pretty much everyone getting moved over to our secondary branch while they tear apart my library and (well, give it a much-needed foundation fix) give us new carpets and shelves and whatnot, there has been a lot of weeding going on. Most of the upstairs weeding happened before the library closed to patrons, and that is where a lot of my new books came from, because, working there, I can just take what I want from the weeding pile and I abuse this power greatly. The children's librarian has been putting off weeding, though, and, since we have a lot of Playaways (basically, little MP3 players that just have a book on them), we've been sort of phasing out our CD audiobooks. Say hello to my new beautiful boys.  Those are four childhood books and one childhood author ( It's the First Day of School... Forever! is a little after my time, but R. L. Stine is NOT), and I am so ple...

Yesterday I read Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld, a book that's gotten some mixed reviews--I think the review that puts it best is Dahla Alder's , particularly when she wonders who the target audience is for this book. I enjoyed it; the only thing I wasn't a huge fan of was the romance aspects of Lizzie's part of the story. One thing all of Darcy's writerly stuff did for me, though, as an unpublished person who wants to be traditionally published, was make me want to write my ass off. Any good book will do that, but a book that's at least all right that's about writing or publishing? Hell yeah it makes me want to fight. I'm currently in the process of querying agents, and it made me check my email much more frequently than was probably necessary or okay, seeing as I was at work. But it also made me want to work on things, to rewrite, to revise, to throw some words down on the page.  I don't know what it is about books on writing, but I know that ...

Whaaaat this is a total cop-out for this Thursday's post and I'm sorry, especially because on Tuesday there was nothing because vacation, no computer, barely any internet access. But this is what it is, so, here we are. It's not a big schedule change for posting; videos are still going on Monday-Wednesday-Friday and posts are still going up Tuesday-Thursday, I'm just cutting out the weekend post. Weekends are for no posting. That's it. See you tomorrow with a new video!

I own a lot of books. This is not a surprise to anyone who knows me; I have so, so many books. A lot of these books are different books, but a lot of these books are multiple editions of one book-- Lord of the Flies, The Chocolate War, and basically every Stephen King book ever are books I tend to go for multiple editions of. Recently, I was in Goodwill, because that's who I am as a person, and I saw the new edition of the first Gone book. I own the entire series, in the hideous old covers that I love . I love those overdramatic teenagers posing on the cover of a series that is so much darker (and, honestly, so much better-done) than those covers make it look. The new covers  fit the series much better, if I'm being completely honest. The Gone series is probably my favorite series. Not my favorite book (that honor still goes to The Long Walk by Stephen King), but my favorite series overall (even if I haven't read Monster yet). So, even though I hesitated a little becaus...

Lately I've been feeling in a rut. Like I'm just stuck here, in the middle of nowhere North Dakota, with nothing real going on. And doing nothing real. Which is definitely bullshit, I mean, even they're not exciting, the things happening are real, Aurora , and I'm sure it's just a going-into-senior-year-of-college thing. I hate living with my parents. I love my parents. And when I haven't seen them for a while, living with them seems like the best. But I hate being almost twenty-one years old and living with my parents. The reason I am is because I've got one year left of college and I don't want to waste money on an apartment or anything, but my plan, to save the most money possible, is to live with them for an entire year after I graduate, and to be honest, I don't think I can do it. Maybe my feelings will change, and I know that sometimes I get into weird let's-hold-onto-childhood states of mind, but at the moment, this is literally the ...