Posts tagged with "organization" - Faerye Net

Pie tracking enabled

2009-06-11T15:06:48+00:00

Yes, I will now be updating a list of all the pie types I’ve made, to be found here: Pies I Have Made.

Why am I doing this? Why do I assume you, gentle reader, care about pies? Well, firstly, it’s PIE, so why wouldn’t you? Secondly, as Spike would say, I hate to brag — who am I kidding, I love to brag! Alternatively, you can see this as a cry for help. I am obviously addicted to pie manufacture.

My memory may have failed me here and there — all the more reason to keep careful track from now on. This list is roughly chronological. Hopefully I will update it within the next few days with June’s Homemade Pie of the Month!

Some of you may be shocked, despite my tree nut allergies, to see that I’ve never made a pecan pie. I think. I remember having finished one my grandma started, but I’ve never soloed that pie flight. That will probably change this Thanksgiving.

What is historical fiction?

2008-11-13T22:50:01+00:00

I have this problem: I like confusing genre boundaries, but I like putting books in boxes. Online, they call them shelves. It’s easier with tags, but shelves have to justify their existence: it’s silly to create a shelf for just one item. So, I was celebrating the inauguration of my somewhat snottily-named “literary-is-a-genre” shelf just now by adding previously “genreless” pieces of fiction to it, and I immediately ran into trouble. I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek begins in 1950’s Chicago, and continues into the 1960’s or so. It’s definitely literary fiction, but isn’t it historical as well? Why didn’t I have it shelved that way? I wouldn’t shelve The Blind Assassin that way, though it goes way farther back, because it proceeds to the era of its writing. Dybek’s shnovel does not. Does that make it historical fiction?

Is it a requirement that historical fiction be set in a sufficiently remote era? The 1950’s are next-door to World War II, which boasts any amount of historical fiction. Are novels set in the 1960’s historical fiction? The 1980’s? Does the era have to inform the story (how can it not?) or is the requirement that the author inform the reader about the era? Is The Things They Carried historical fiction, because it was about the Vietnam War but published in 1990? Is it not historical fiction because it depicts a period and place the author did live through? Does the magnitude of events depicted (their historicity) affect whether something is historical fiction? Does the age of the narrator? (I’ve been considering the idea that my internal genre-o-meter reads I Sailed with Magellan as non-historical because the 1950s protagonist is a child, thus implying an older narrator in a later time-period. If he were a child protagonist in the 1850’s, thus rendering his imagined adult self ‘historical’ as well, would it twitch the genre-o-meter in a different way?)

I have thoroughly confused myself, and should go to sleep. How about you? Got clarity?

Book organizing

2008-10-21T21:55:54+00:00

*dusts off website* *evicts family of pigeons roosting in blog software*

Greetings from Portland, where two industrious humans and one cat (slightly less lazy than usual) are unpacking and reassembling their home. Also trying to keep at least part of it from disappearing under the resultant layers of empty cardboard and crumpled newsprint, but that’s another story. The big story here is that for the first time in recorded history, Ryan has more books on shelves than I do. Yes, the man who was storing his books largely in artistically arranged stacks (don’t knock it, I’ve seen it done very beautifully by the French) has an entire bookcase full of the beggars. Whereas the woman who used LibraryThing to tag her books with the number of the box they were packed in…has 14 in a tiny Target bookshelf. Ooh, and the Millennium Edition of Lord of the Rings sitting flat on another shelf.

So book-arranging has been under discussion. Ryan, in the course of getting other people to go to Ikea to buy this now-full bookcase, made it clear that my books should stay away from his books (like beets from mashed potatoes) because our systems are different. I like mine alphabetized by author, and he recoils in horror from this idea (like the average human from beets). His mom (in the ‘other people’ going to Ikea) says she does hers by topic, then by size within topic. Ryan said this sounded about like what he does, though he conceded my point that having books by the same author together made sense. However, so far, looking at his bookcase, I don’t see that author-grouping occurring much. Here are the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels next to a glossary for the Aubrey-Maturin novels…good call. On the next shelf, two non-Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian together, next to two Jonathan Lethem books, next to a Brust novel which isn’t next to any other Brust novels. Well, it’s a stand-alone, isn’t it? But still in the Dragaeraverse…then there are the random sprinklings of Heinlein. I don’t really get it. You’ll have to ask him. But it appears that taller books are on the sides, which I guess is pleasing to the eye.

Which is (at last! Your patience is rewarded!) the point of this blog post. I had never thought of using book size as the organizing precept within each shelf of my library. When Ruth first said the words, I had to blink to reorder my universe, as if she’d said she organized her books by color (which I hear used to be pretty common). It made me wonder if my system seems as odd to others. Here is how I organize my books:

One shelf of ‘fawncy’ books (collector’s editions, rare-ish editions, leather-bound, otherwise pretty). I’ve kicked a few borderline books off this shelf when it got too crowded. Points for being beloved as well as beautiful, or for sentimental value. This shelf’s arranged to look nice, with a preponderance of slipcovered editions on one end.

The rest of my fiction books, regardless of target audience age, alphabetically by author, then by title except within series.

Fiction anthologies, themed then general, alphabetical by title.

Poetry books, alphabetical by author.

Poetry anthologies. I don’t really have enough to have a rubric. Don’t hurt me, poets!

Nonfiction. Ah, this is the question. Right now, it’s alphabetical by author. But doesn’t topic make more sense? I used topic originally, so there must have been some good reason why I changed. When in doubt, consider libraries. They use topic for non-fiction. But then I end up trying to decide whether to put pterosaurs before or after dinosaurs in the paleo section, and which possible segue book to use. Maybe I should get a labelmaker and use the Library of Congress system.

Exceptions: oversize/art books, bottom shelf. When I had franchised novels, I put them all together alphabetically by franchise (under ‘S’. Yes. I mean those. Those, too.)

Obviously, I’m open to changing how I shelve nonfiction. I am also still struggling with the question of drama, which in my case is 90% Shakespeare (the Shakespeare:drama ratio is even higher than the paleontology:nonfiction ratio. I have at least two complete works and massive piles of individual plays.) I have been shelving it as fiction, but perhaps it needs its own section, cuddling up to poetry, since it is, after all, largely Shakespeare.

This entire system was implemented in high school. Before that, I used a system of vague feelings. I read constantly, and reread constantly, and relied on my long searching browsings of the shelves (to decide what to reread next) to refresh my impressions of the current state of the shelves. So, if I had a sudden desire for a specific book — say The Midnight Folk – I would stand in some fairly clear patch of my bedroom floor – possibly balancing awkwardly, if the clear patches were far apart – and summon the physical memory of the book, the picture on the front, the color of the spine, until I remembered where I’d last seen it. This was possibly good for the mental muscles and may count as meditation, but it was an odd book-organization system.

How about you? How do you organize your books? And if you are Ruth or Ryan and I have grossly misstated your system, feel free to abuse and disabuse.

Alphabetic bias?

2008-07-26T18:17:24+00:00

I was just reorganizing my writing folder (on Puck, my laptop) to reflect the theory that I’m now an Author, not a writing student (a thin proposition, I know). Putting my stories together regardless of whether I wrote them to show to an advisor or not, et cetera. I thought as long as they were all together, I might as well color-code the folders to reflect the submissions-status of each story, using the color codes I do in my submissions spreadsheet.

Yes, this is really Felicity. I do in fact have an organized bone in my body. Possibly three, to make up an entire finger. Anyway, I color-coded away and discovered that of the 15 stories in the folder, the three that are out in editors’ mail bins right now (blue) are in letters A through F, whereas the eight that are ready to go out but are NOT out (green) are clustered at the end of the alphabet, mostly around ‘S’. Does my subconscious mind discriminate by letter?

Maybe it’s wise to do so, because the only published story I have starts with ‘B’….

Update, August 7, 2008: My other accepted story starts with ‘A’. Hmm.

Kipple

2003-08-07T22:46:06+00:00

Sometimes I feel like my life is filling up with what P.K. Dick called kipple — clutter, useless junk, but not just the items themselves, the windrows they form, but the force of entropy multiplying them, forcing them on you, choking you in a sea of useless, discarded, and ultimately inescapable rubbish.

I don’t think it helps that my boss is a pack-rat. I go to work, and I’m surrounded by articles he’s clipped, correspondence he’s kept, and little trinkets he thought were interesting dating back to my elementary school years. Currently, at work, we’re trying to organize this stuff. I find it very frustrating. Not only that I have to do this for someone else (I was told by my {"Clean your room!“} parents all my {”Clean your room!“} life eventually emerging from the kipple was my {”Clean your room!"} OWN moral obligation and duty.) but that I come home from having done this for 4 hours or more a day, and I walk into the same mass of kipple, multiplying, spreading, striving against the checking influence of my husband, teeming, defiant; that I left in order to go to work in the morning. I figured out a long time ago that work is selling your life for money. Now it appears that it’s selling the little organizational impulse I have for money, too, and soon I will drown in a pile of sketches I must keep, books I’ll read later, coupons I’ve clipped, awards I’ve won, gifts I’ve received, and toys I’ve loved.