What I'm Reading...and hopefully writing

I'm still fairly creatively paralyzed. I hope I'll be able to come off of it soon, but I got hit with something bigger than my crashed hard drive: A big setback to our adoption. We were declined by our adoption agency. They gave 3 reasons. One was Rob's work situation which just improved. Another is something more private--health related, not character--and nothing can be done about it. The last is debt. They said ours was massive even though it's mostly educational loans. I felt that was fishy. The average mortgage in America is what we have in total debt and we have a plan to pay it off.

The next day, Rob spoke with our social worker and she said the agency gave her a different reason: my not wanting to have birth children. Because I chose adoption first, they declined us. And then were dishonest about why. They wanted our social worker to give us the news. She told them no. They were the ones declining us, so they had to tell us.

We're now looking, again, for the right adoption agency that can help us get our little girl.

So that's why no writing. Heck, I'm hardly imagining. That's a bad sign.

But I have been reading. In fact, I've hit a milestone: I finished the Mozart biography I've been reading a breakfast for some time now. I finished it on Monday. I've now started The Last Escape, a book about Allied prisoners of war in the hands of the Nazis.

I also finished my novel, the take-with-me book, last night. I was reading Black Cross. Sorry, can't remember the author except his last name was Iles or Giles. I think Iles. It was good. Very exciting toward the end. So now I've got Blink by Ted Dekker.

I realized I wanted some record of the books read. Since I started the "breakfast book" (reading at breakfast, even if only a couple pages), I've actually read quite a few books. I might have read 4 or 5 big history books in a year, but I couldn't say for sure. I thought of opening a Twitter account just for little notes on what I'm reading or writing each day. Still might. Or might not. I don't like Twitter, but think it might be useful to me just for that.

Writing? Not much. I wrote a short poem. It came to me as I was reading about attachment in older adopted children on AdoptionVoices (It's a social network for those involved in adoption--including family and friends). I put it on my wall there.

Status of Stories

• Philippe's Alien Us--wrote 2 scenes of Chapter 15 a couple of weeks ago.
  
• Purgatory--still in purgatory
  
• The Honored--no movement. Thought about it though.