My own personal lending library

I meant to write a post yesterday, but instead I was raiding my dad's bookshelves. Big Brother asked to see my library card at one point when I wandered past with another couple of books in my hand, which made me think how lucky I am to have access to such a resource. My parents have thousands of books, crammed into every available space in their relatively small house. Years of birthday and Christmas presents, weekends spent at bookshops, charity shops, car boot sales. Inherited books from half a dozen relatives. Not all of it's to my taste but what a place to spend a couple of hours. It doesn't follow the fashions of public lending libraries, never clears out books that no-one's looked at in a while, and out of print books are a speciality. Hooray for bibliophile families.

As you may know if you've been following this blog for a while, I go a bit mad in libraries, and the family one is no exception - I emerged with a carrier bag full of detective novels. My dad's got me into Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series recently - think Dashiell Hammett with literary pretensions - so I nabbed another couple of those. All this could be considered research for my own detective novel, now just over 4000 words in (it's been a very productive week). Learning from my experience of ScriptFrenzy, I've written daily targets on my motivational writing calendar and at the end of each day this week I've written my wordcount next to the day's target. Until yesterday, when I didn't write anything at all, I was past my target every day. It's working at the moment, but I'm not sure how long it will be effective as a motivational technique.

Best go put the inspirational trilby on and get writing - I've got two days' targets to meet.