Articles in “Random Photographs”

Important note 1: I love my job. I’m just making it look creepy and depressing for fun.

Important note 2: The Circulating Library’s traditional annual live-blogging of the Eurovision semi-finals will begin tomorrow night from 7:30 pm. I’ll add more information tomorrow morning, but if you can join us, do: the live-blogging wouldn’t be as much fun without you.

If you imagine that I’m listening to Poison as I post this, then these photographs pretty much sum up the last fortnight:

(Well, Nick is pretty much a constant, of course—thank goodness for that.)

You know what’s noticeable by its absence above?

Books.

I haven’t read a new book in weeks—though I have a brand-new Diana Wynne Jones that I had to shove on a shelf out of my sight because it was staring at me accusingly. And the new Jasper Fforde. And the first book in a boarding-school series that I’m fairly sure doesn’t include vampires but is bound to include some other kind of sexy supernatural creature who makes a surprisingly good boyfriend.

But I can’t risk getting caught up in a book I can’t put down. Frankly, I’m surprised at myself: I’m not normally good at delayed gratification.

I’ve been writing, though. Writing, and writing, and writing.

I’ve teased out issues of law and social custom in the U.S. Deep South in the 1930s, something that involved some fairly unpleasant Googling.

I’ve raised a dark menace from the sea, deleted a king, and nearly drowned two fictional children in a chameleonic city with no name.

I’ve tried desperately to keep up with Steven Moffat’s whipcrack dialogue.

I’m loving the writing.

But this, after all, is The Circulating Library. It would be fairly egotistical even for me to only read what I’ve actually written myself.

Still, I’ll have time to read Enchanted Glass soon. Surely?

These photos are the result of my belated discovery of the “colour accent” feature on my camera, which allows me to accent a specific colour in an otherwise black-and-white photograph.

With this function, I hope to one day make my fortune producing Hallmark cards.

I present them in honour (also belated) of the first book of Jasper Fforde’s new Shades of Grey series, which I hope to be able to wallow in at some point in the not-too-distant future.