Books I'm reading right now:

Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood
The Librarian by Larry Beinhart

You'll be relieved to hear that I have stopped wheeling the weekend hours away watching movies, although I'm ashamed to admit that I've filled the void with Deadwood Season 2 and the first season of the Peep Show. More alarmingly, my aloof fondness for the Daily Show and the Colbert Report has snowballed into a full-on addiction, and I've been getting the shakes and sweats and hallucinating about baby goats when they're in re-run. Is that normal? It's just, when I don't have those two watching my back, I'm apprehensive about my knowledge of daily events, despite the two hours a day I spend tuned into Democracy Now, NPR, or one of those cable news channels that have all the rolling bars and side boxes to feed my ADD, and despite compulsively reading the Yahoo News headlines every chance I get during the day, and despite my addiction to periodicals of all shapes and sizes. The sages at Comedy Central summarize. They filter. They entertain.

So, yes when I learned that Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice when she was 21, I felt the gnawing acid of envy splash through my stomach, but then I paused (and turned the channel) and pondered. Was Miss Austen tempted by the triple Sirens of blogging, talking on the phone, and channel surfing at the same time? I think not. And if my only diversions were teatime and the English countryside, might I achieve more with my writing? Perhaps. But I think I'd miss Colbert.