Monday, March 12th, 2012 | Author:

My progress in getting through my to-be-read shelf has taken two big hits lately. First, the pull-chain on my bedside lamp broke. Which wouldn’t have been quite such an issue if the lamp wasn’t also my bedside table, and kind of too expensive to just replace entirely. Fortunately, my husband isn’t afraid of wiring, and after a trip to Home Depot – and about a thousand reminders from me to take care of it, please – he fixed the light. Hooray! I could read in bed again!

Just in time for Mass Effect 3 to be released! For those who don’t know, that’s the final installment in a pretty seriously epic video game series, of which I have been an embarrassingly fervent fangirl since 2007. So of course I had to play it right away, which means that all my leisure time has been spent in front of the TV for the past week or so.

Of course, just because I haven’t been reading much doesn’t mean that I’ve left my TBR shelf completely alone. No, I’ve been adding to it. I’m still managing not to buy any new books, but that’s not slowing me down as much as I thought it might. That many Smashwords authors celebrated the recent “Read an Ebook Week” by making titles available for free with a discount code didn’t help a bit – I think I’ve downloaded another 30+ titles since my last blog post. Oops.

I have a really funny story about my out-of-control urge to obtain new books, actually. It’s also a funny story about drugs – but nothing too scandalous! The drug in question is zolpidem – many people know it by the brand name Ambien – which is used to treat insomnia. It’s pretty effective, and I’m glad to have it when I need it, because sleep is one of those things that one can’t really do without (trust me). But it turns out that for lots of people – myself included, on occasion – being asleep while on zolpidem doesn’t necessarily mean being in bed with your eyes closed and snoring and so on.

Sometimes it means performing fairly complex tasks just as though you were awake, only without the awake part. Most often, this just means weird conversations which you won’t remember – though the person you share a bed with will, and he will make merciless fun of you for your philosophical musings about what responsibilities you as a creator have to the imaginary hedgehogs sitting on your stomach – but it can also involve a lot more activity than that.

I’ve sent emails in my sleep and chatted with friends over Google Talk using my phone, and once got out of bed and went into another room to fetch a cookbook so that I could look up a recipe for creamed onions. Luckily for me, I don’t say anything when I’m asleep that I wouldn’t have said while awake in my emails, and my grammar is much better than that of my friends who drunk-text, so no one gives me too much of a hard time over it. And when I looked up the onion recipe, I carefully marked the place and set my copy of Joy of Cooking down next to the bed so I’d trip on it in the morning and remember what I had done, but I didn’t actually try to cook.

But it’s usually just plain old sleeping, and since I’ve never done anything dangerous or really embarrassing while on zolpidem, I keep using it when I have insomnia.

Which is how I came to download a book in my sleep.

Yes, that’s right. Apparently not content with my waking book haul, I got out of bed, came into the study, looked up a title I was interested in on Amazon (I had read earlier in the day on a forum that it would soon be offered for free), and had it sent to the Kindle app on my phone, all while completely checked out.

I was pretty confused when I woke up in the morning and saw that I had mysteriously acquired a new book overnight, that’s for sure. Luckily, it was actually free by the time I hit that seductive “Buy now with 1-Click” button. I’m just glad that I didn’t suddenly have a sleep-addled urge to buy anything else – who knows what I could have ended up with!

Well, more books, probably.

I should probably start turning my electronics off before bedtime, huh?


By the way, there’s still time to help my work make it into Circlet Press’s best-of print anthology! Just go to the poll here and vote for “A Woman of Uncommon Accomplishment” by Elizabeth Reeve (from Sense & Sensuality) before March 15th.

Want to read an excerpt first? I’ve posted one here on my site.

Thanks for your support!

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