Books, books, books

Last night I read Fly on the Wall, the new YA book by E. Lockhart about a girl who turns into a fly to spy on the boys. As with The Boyfriend List, I thought the author did a great job conveying the main character's humorous thought processes. I also took her "What's Your Fly Style?" quiz online, which said I'm a nosy fly. Well, sure, I'm a writer, I have to be a bit nosy about how other people live and think...but I'm really not a gossip! (Plus, if I change one answer to another I almost picked, I come out as a do-gooder fly.) Minor spoiler alert: I found it interesting that the book never explains the mechanism by which the girl becomes a fly. She wishes to be a fly on the wall, and she is. I once wrote a story about a girl who turned into a pig just by wishing it, and got taken to task for not explaining why/how her wish was granted. Apparently, Delacorte Press does not find this sort of explanation necessary. So there.

In other booky news, I finally got my voter registration certificate on Thursday, so I could finally get a library card here! (I needed some kind of ID showing I was a permanent resident, and there have been some hang-ups trying to get our cars registered or get driver's licenses...) I ran out immediately that day to get a card and check out a bunch of stuff. The library here has a rather odd automated check-out system, but I'm amazed you can check most items out for 3 weeks (we're used to 2), and that you check out up to 5 of each type of audio-visual item! Our old library had a limit of 2 total audio-visual items at a time, but this library has a much larger collection of them. I'm still getting used to the fact that Florida does nearly everything on a county basis, but I think that works well for libraries. We once had an Austin address but lived outside of the city limits, so we had no library available to us for free, and had to pay $54 per year for an Austin library card! Here, the library systems encompass whole counties so it doesn't matter if you're in the city limits or not. I think our closest library here is a pretty nice one, too. I'm not sure I like the children's section quite as well as at my old one, but the YA section seems much larger.

Then there's my own book. Or, there's not my own book. I haven't done a thing about my revision, except for printing out the critique I want to refer to. So, it's unlikely I'll have it revised in 8 days, but I may do something on it today. We'll see. I'm not quite ready to commit to it! (Also, I'm petrified to tackle it.)