the road to hell is paved with adverbs

I just read Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft in one go. I've read several writing-related books, but this one of all of them is the keeper. The middle section, in which he actually discusses the mechanics and process of writing, is sharp and insightful; the beginning section, in which he lays out the key pieces of his life that shaped his writer's toolbox, reads like a story; and the final section, about his near death when a reckless driver hit him as he was walking, was gutwrenching. I actually teared up at the end, which is rather rare in a book supposedly about craft. If you have any desire to write, read this. If you love Stephen King, read this, even if you decide to skip the middle segment. Or if you just want an example of excellent writing, read this -- King may be criticized by the literary establishment, but his storytelling is genius.

The rest of my day was pretty laid back. I spent the morning and early afternoon cleaning my bathroom, tossing an accumulation of half-used cosmetics and scrubbing the bathtub in an effort to enforce order on the least ordered part of my apartment. I spent a couple of hours thinking about what I want to do next with my novel, but the temptation to read rather than write was too strong, and the Stephen King book had been sitting on my table and calling to me for a couple of weeks. I really do need to work more time for reading into my life -- and I need to stop trying to read books in one sitting, and instead let them linger and learn to savor them without setting them aside forever.

Tomorrow will be a mix between the book and some must-do stuff for my day job; I am annoyed at myself for breaking my weekends-are-sacred vow after only two months back at my job, but the business plan for my group is due next week, and since I'm co-presenting with a guy who is working eighty hours a week and seems extremely stressed, it seems only fair that I would volunteer to polish up half the slides this weekend rather than leaving him alone to his fate. But I need to restructure my calendar and wrangle it into some semblance of order; I need to get back to writing and/or reading every single day, and I've fallen woefully off the wagon in the past two weeks.

Now, though, I'm going to go to bed, and hope that tomorrow brings some much-needed productivity!