And hot again, but surprisingly few students

I went to bed at 1.30 am.

Bad.

And I didn’t even sleep well.

I then decided to skip yoga and meditation, also not my best moment.

But. I walked to the nearby supermarket (very slowly) and got groceries, I hung up a load of laundry, I did dishes twice, oh no, three times, and I finally made red currant jelly. Only 4 1/2 jars, though.

But first there was lunch:

Then I met a student and her mother who wanted to stop lessons. She is still in kindergarten and ukulele is very hard at that age.

Then dishes, then one student, and then I made the jelly and tidied the kitchen afterwards:

I taught another student, my last student canceled and I ate junk for dinner and almost immediately regretted it. I keep thinking that I want something crunchy and salty as a treat and most of the time afterwards I feel as if I ate cardboard. Cardboard that is poking me in the stomach. Meh.

I played some Genshin Impact and then met with my writer friend for writing.

We did not write a lot. I told her about the very exciting scam email I had gotten from someone pretending to be from a noticeable bug publishing house. The editor they claimed to be actually exists but are acquiring math and science books. There was a very detailed and flattering review of my first book and they pretended to want to work with me in the future.

Yeah, no. Because editors of major publishing houses write to indie authors who don’t really sell all the time and offer them some vague business opportunity. Sure.

She in turn told me about a webinar she had just watched about AI critique for one’s manuscript. Nah.

Anyway, I did write for half an hour and it went well but a whole hour would have been better. I was somewhat tired at this point, though.

So I started writing this post, read a little, wrote a list and went to bed.

Oh, and regarding the question whether readers remember book titles or author names or whatever, I’d say it totally depends. There are things like „the latest Stephen King“ or whatever where the author name is most important.

There are also series where the series title is the most important and I have to say I often buy books because I find the title promising, especially if I have no idea who the author is.

Now I do get where the ‚only the author name is important‘-thought is coming from. Eventually you want to get readers who buy everything you write. Like, K J Charles is an auto-buy for me. As is Ilona Andrews.

But I’m pretty sure if you ask my mother about any of the books she read this year she probably won’t remember the title or the author but she could tell you part of the plot because that’s what stuck with her.

She, by the way, is a completely different reader from me. Where I go and buy basically everything some people recommend on the internet, or as I said, some authors are auto-buy for me, so every time I stumble over a new title from them I just click buy, my mother only reads what friends and family recommend. She doesn’t really buy books either, she just borrows them from her friends.

My parents were both voracious readers and they basically only read what they got as presents or borrowed from friends and family. Buying a book was rare. Like, my father might be at an airport and be bored and buy one book, maybe two. He’d ask for the next book in a series he liked for Christmas and for his birthday, so that would be – two books, maybe three.

They (and we) read every book in the house and all that we could lay our fingers on. Discovering the library when I was around 9 was a revelation.

And then, when I moved to Munich for university, and I realized that even if I didn’t have much money I could just walk into a bookstore and buy a book or two, just like that? Mind blown!

And that, right there, growing up as someone who read sometimes 10 or more books a week (I read fast, I had about two hours per day on public transport and I hated watching TV and didn’t really meet friends much, and also books meant for teenagers tend to be very short, I could read one in about two hours.), that is the reason I have a pile of books I really want to read that would be miles high if I would still buy physical books.