The second is read a lot, which is something I have been good at for a very long time. My mother used to dread when the Scholastic and Troll catalogs would get given out in class, when I was in grammar school; I suspect her wallet might actually have shrunk in fear those days. I would try to control myself, I would, but I just couldn’t help circling nearly every book in the thin paper catalogs, unless they were about sports. Sports I didn’t do, but every other genre was fair game. To my mother’s – and my family’s – credit, I usually managed to get most of what I circled. By the time the next catalog came out, I’d have devoured every single title and was ready for more.

It hasn’t changed much. I can spend hours in a bookstore, especially used bookstores, and book catalogs will still end up folded and marked with all the titles I want. Now that it’s my wallet shrinking in fear, I do exercise some control, at least when it comes to full-priced books. Clearance tables, garage sale boxes and library sales are fair game, however, and will usually result in my coming home with at least a dozen more to add to the stacks and piles that litter every room in my house. I have also become quite adept at culling the stacks and shelves on a regular basis, more so now that I’ve discovered a local used bookstore that deals in trades and credits. So the house is not as covered with books as it could be, a fact of which I remind my husband on a regular basis.

I tend to read three books at a time. One book is the car book. It lives in the car and is there for me when I find myself in need of a book — stuck in line at DMV, for example, or in need or reading material when someone else is driving. There is the purse book, which occasional does double duty as the office book; the latter part is pretty self-explanatory and the former means I always have a book when I am eating in a restaurant by myself (something I actually quite enjoy doing). Then there is the house book, which is the book I read in the house. Three books, at any given time, save those times when one book holds my complete attention, which does happen from time to time.

So I’ve got the reading a lot thing covered, at least. Here is the list of my current three books.

The car book: The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton — I’ve been working on this one for a while; car books tend to take the longest, since they live in the car. It’s reasonably entertaining and fluffy, with some real moments of emotional candor and wisdom. I will be interested to see how it ends.

The purse book: A Fistful of Charms by Kim Harrison — This is the fourth book in an urban fantasy series known as The Hollows; there are eight books so far. These are my beach read fluff books. They are not, so far anyway, what I would consider the height of the genre. The main character is not a favorite and I often want to reach into the pages and slap her around a little bit. But the secondary characters are interesting and I am enjoying the strange politics of The Hollows itself.

The house book: The Naming of the Beasts by Mike Carey — I am nearly done with this, the fifth Felix Castor novel. This book and series is definitely up in the heights of urban fantasy. This latest installment is gripping and tense, and I have been forcing myself to read slowly since I have no idea when book 6 is coming. And book 6 will end the series! The heartbreak. Good thing I plan to reread this series. Often.

I am also lucky enough to do book reviews for Horror Web (www.horror-web.com), where I am known as Penny Dreadful. The books currently waiting reviews – all of which I will get to before the end of the week – are FEED (Mira Grant), Bite Me (Christopher Moore) and Felix Castor 4 & 5 (Thicker Than Water and the aforementioned Naming of the Beasts). Please do go to Horror Web and read some of my reviews, and poke around the site, too. It’s a fantastic resource for horror fans.

I am tired tonight but still I am writing. I don’t know if anyone actually reads this or if anyone ever will. It’s that way with many of the things I write — the things I write for pleasure, anyway, for myself as opposed to the endless ads and posters and bookmarks and brochures I bang out from nine to five every day. I am not sure who reads the real stuff, the good stuff. Sometimes I believe the words are read and they penetrate. Sometimes I don’t. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I write them anyway. I write them because I want to and because I have to, sometimes I write when I don’t even notice I am doing it.

I am tired tonight but still there are words to share, words to craft and shape and puzzle together. They are coming slower now, it’s true. Tonight, the words are sleepy, too. The pictures still some, the still-amorphous ideas that will shift and slide and eventually gel into something I can use somewhere, fit somewhere. Or they won’t. Some words never fit or haven’t so far. It doesn’t matter. Still they come and someone has to write them down. It might as well be me. Sometimes I think it has to be me.

I am tired tonight but I am proud. I am proud that my clacking fingers make words and sentences, form ideas and the beginnings and endings of stories true and false. I am glad there is an internet for my words. It is a far cry and a nice change from all the old notebooks and scratch pads hidden under the bed and lost behind bureaus, all the napkins and scraps with half-sentences and trailing paragraphs. I am glad I have a place to keep it all, where I can choose to share it, to put it out there, wherever there turns out to be. I hope someone is reading; I hope a lot of someones are reading, if not now then eventually. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. And though I am tired tonight, I am a tired writer. And that, my invisible friends, is what matters.

Take one dilapidated Eastern European castle, one potentially insane old doyenne who refuses to leave the oldest part of the castle, a wealthy former nerd bent on turning the castle into a “spiritual retreat,” his pseudo-punk technologically-addicted cousin who might have accidentally almost killed said nerd back when they were kids, a sprinkle of old-fashioned Gothic horror, and a handful of post-modern storytelling. Shake well. What do you get?

“Gee, Penny Dreadful! I think I get a great modern classic that I’m just itching to read! Right?”

Not exactly. Actually, what you get is an annoying blend of three perfectly fine individual stories that combine as a pseudo-intellectual take on the genre that tries way too hard to be Serious Literature. That’s what you get in Jennifer Egan’s The Keep.

It starts off well enough and managed to hook me pretty quick. Pseudo-cyber punk Danny makes his way to cousin Howie’s latest real estate purchase, an old castle somewhere in Eastern Europe (no one is exactly clear on where, since “the border are constantly changing”). The story has great pace in the beginning, perfectly communicating Danny’s personality–a post-goth slacker, utterly addicted to a life of technology and living off the good graces of anyone who will give him some cash and a place to live. He is the perfect 21st-century 20-something laggard, all flash and surface charm, convinced the world owes him a living while secretly agonizing over guilt from his past (naturally over something he did to the cousin). There’s a lot of unease and confusion, even more so when Danny realizes that he is technologically cut off here — even his satellite phone doesn’t work.

Howie is a well-drawn character, too. He’s the ideal the geek made good who might indeed have been driven a little crazy as a result of childhood trauma. Is he a savvy adult trying to play a little trick to pay back a childhood hurt? Or is there a darker motive at play, a deeper, more obsessive and destructive kind of revenge?

Just when you start to care about those questions, however, things start to go a little wonky. Danny and Howie (and their host of minor character) are actually mere characters in someone else’s story–a prison inmate taking a writing class. He’s only writing the story to get time and attention from the young, pretty writing teacher, whom Egan makes clear is very out of place in the prison educational system. Or at least we think that’s it, because suddenly it seems the inmate might be Howie’s 2nd in command. Who might have killed Howie. In what might have been a love triangle.

Maybe.

In fact, it all might be a story, a memoir written by the writing teacher after her stint as a prison educator. But the truth is, by the time things reached that point, I really didn’t care. I started off caring about Howie and Danny and their castle and the madwoman in the keep, and Howie’s wife and kids and whether or not the wife had an affair because Howie was getting dangerously obsessed with the castle. I loved the madwoman–what fan of Gothic fiction doesn’t love a madwoman?–and wondered at her power and potential supernatural abilities. I didn’t give a damn about the prison inmates. They were in the way of the story I did care about, and I cared even less about the teacher, who was the stereotype of the pretty prison teacher woman, with her heart of gold and desire to see the good in all the inmates. Screw that – bring back the mad duchess!

I don’t recommend The Keep. I could have, if the first narrative was the only narrative or if perhaps the two primary stories — castle vs prison–were two entirely separate books (each being potentially interesting enough on their own). But this strange mishmosh of three stories trying desperately to weave into one narrative was annoying and unsatisfying. It left me with a sense of wasted time and wasted talent, and that is the last thing I want from a horror novel.

The Dictionary Is Your Friend

It always seemed like the dumbest adult statement ever: “If you don’t know how to spell it, look it up in the dictionary.”

How was I supposed to do that if I couldn’t spell the word in the first place? Duh, Mom.

Of course, I eventually realized that it was possible to look up a word you couldn’t spell, since most of the time I at least had an inkling of the first few letters. I learned how to better use the dictionary, too, and my vocabulary got a little bonus boost. And while I never went as far as Diane Court did, I did enjoy looking up new words and learning interesting ways to pepper everyday conversation with polysyllabic whoppers that confused and impressed both parents and teachers.

I never lost my love for the dictionary, though it was eventually sharing shelf space with various thesauri and quotation collections and any other wordy reference book I could find. I fell madly in love with the complete OED when I first learned about it, and still long for a copy of my very own, so I can pet it and love it and look up obscure etymologies.

Which brings me to my point, really – there are an awful lot of dictionaries out there, right on the internet. Google comes up with 243 million results for the word; a quick glance at the first page shows the big names, like Merriam-Webster, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford. There are medical dictionaries, language dictionaries, urban dictionaries (which is a very pleasant term for what is essentially a collection of vulgarities, sexual slang that puts the Kama Sutra to shame, and an astonishingly wide variety of ethnic and sexist insults), and more. They’re all out there, all free, and all very easy to access. So why, I have to ask, are professional, white collar people still unable to differentiate between choose and chose, lose and loose, and remembering to put the first “r” in library?

The dictionary is your friend. Its presence on the Internet means it can be your secret friend – no one has to know you can’t spell or that you rely way to hard much on spell check. But everyone will know when you send out the memo with all the misspellings or – worse yet – the national ad copy that encourages you to “except there help on all you’re most important clinet needs before it effects busines.”

Reread that bit in quotes, please. Count the errors. There are six. If you make one, that’s a slip, a simple mistake, a typo. But make more than one and you might be an idiot. OK, maybe you’re not REALLY an idiot, but you look like one. And that is bad for business.