For the past year, my daughter’s been systematically “downsizing.” What does that mean to her? She’s been “decluttering” rooms and tossing or giving away things she doesn’t actually use. She’s gone on a closet-cleaning craze where she places everything on hangers—backwards—and if she hasn’t turned the hanger, meaning she’s taken out the garment and worn it, at the end of the year, it goes.

She’s now turned her attention to my living space.

She supervised a closet review, where every single piece of clothing was dumped onto my bed and reviewed. “Does it fit? No?” Gone. “When was the last time you wore it?” If I can’t tell her it was in recent years, it’s gone. Yes, it is nice to have room to slide my hangars, but gah!

Now, she wants to trim my bookcases, because—shame, shame—not all my books fit into my three tall bookcases. I’ve tried to make room, double and triple stacking, but, to her, that’s not good enough. I can trim some of the books I read for entertainment. Very few are those I’d want to read again. However, that’s not enough.

She’s running up against my stubborn hold on my research books. After all, I need all those occult and mythology books. Who doesn’t have rows of them? Or at least, what writer who loves to delve into mystical topics doesn’t collect research materials? The problem is, my occult and mythology collection is larger than my local library’s and the two colleges’ libraries in town.

I have many, many spell books. Translations of writings from Egyptian sarcophagi and The Land of the Dead, and Sumerian, Norse, Eastern European, etc., “monster” books that I love to thumb through when I’m wishing I could write more stories like my “mummy book”,  Crescent Moon, or my Vikings in Space story, Ravished by a Viking. The problem is, as my dd  and my sister point out all the time, that those stories don’t sell as well as SEALs and bounty hunters!

If you could see me now, I’m frowning and my shoulders are drooping. I love to write my action heroes, but just like I need a varied diet to keep my body healthy, I need to vary what I write—for my own enjoyment and mental health.

I have a SEAL book to finish for Entangled tomorrow. Then I have a SEAL/bounty hunter book to write by the end of the month, and a bounty hunter book due by mid-September. My schedule is crazy-full. I have another Beaux Reve Coven story I’d love to start, but I keep pushing it off due to hard deadlines. And what I really want is to start something new and exciting. Something that pulls from those Sumerian and Egyptian tales, but I have to be smart. Have to make money. You know, to pay my bills…  🙁

So, here I am, having just finished editing another wonderful author’s story, and I’m opening the file for “Spider”—a SEAL story that has plenty of action, in and out of bed. By the end of the day, I have no doubt I’ll be dreaming about what happens next, and forget about my momentary melancholy. I have the best job in the world. I live in my head, most days. I live many lives, many adventures, and I learn something new with every book I write. This time, I’m researching modern booby-traps, like “alarm mines”. Not as exciting as reading about those pesky ice dragons, but—maybe—I’ll pencil in some time in my future schedule for something fun.

So, a question for you…

Do you pretty much exclusively read contemporary romance? Or do you love a paranormal tale, too? If so, what would you love to read?