Lately I’ve fallen into a little better routine, at least as far as my reading is concerned. I have a small book in the pick-up that I read a little in at traffic lights, or just before I get out to go somewhere. Or it’s there when I head into the doctor’s office, like yesterday.

In the evening at home, around 10 p.m., after whatever writing I’ve accomplished or chores I finished, after I tend to family finances and the paperwork that produces, I take up my current book and read. It could be any one of a number of books, though for the last five or six nights I’ve read in my primary book, Letters from an American Farmer, about the status of colonial life right around the American Revolution. I suppose you could call this research for a future volume of Documenting America.

As I sit in my reading chair, I look around the living room. To my right is the built-in bookcase, holding a couple of hundred books, mostly still to be read. Many of them are antique books, handed down through my family. Others are contemporary, mostly Christian topics. To my left, behind the couch, is an antique table with about twenty books on it. These are mainly smaller ones, all modern. Some are devotional, some are small group studies, others similar.

In the bedroom, on the dresser, is another batch of perhaps thirty books of a similar mix to the last described batch. In the secretary in our bedroom are another four shelves of books. Almost all of these are to be read.

Should I describe the lower floor? With it’s twelve book cases, it’s six-foot table with forty books waiting to be shelved? Or the store-room with boxes of books on the utility shelves, and boxes more on the floor, waiting to be donated. For the books downstairs, some have been read, but then kept for our library. Lynda’s read more of her novels than I have of my classics, novels, and non-fiction.

This morning the moon was large in the west, just above the horizon as I pulled away from the house for the 15.6 mile drive to the office. Admiring the moon made me think of the universe, which got me to thinking about science fiction. So far I haven’t written any science fiction—not because I don’t want to, but because the demands of it are so different from what I write now. Plus I don’t need to expand my Genre Identity Disorder any more than it already is.

Years ago, I suppose before I began writing creatively, I thought about the first steps our species would have to take if we were going to leave earth. I actually thought through a couple of series of sci-fi books. I never wrote anything about them, because I didn’t consider myself a writer at the time, and had no ambition to be one. I suppose that was the earliest appearance of those desires.

But the beautiful moon made me once again think of writing sci-fi. That, if it ever happens, would be after the sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousands Screaming People, after the sequel to Doctor Luke’s Assistant. It would be after my series of cozy mysteries, The Alfred Cottage Mysteries. And after the series of books I have brainstormed and somewhat captured on stock trading. And after I turned DLA and its sequel into a series of early church history books. For sure it will be after I edit and publish China Tour.

It would probably be after the six Christian non-fiction books I’ve programmed to write in future years, after the few more books I’ve thought of for the Documenting America series. And certainly after I somehow get my poetry book, Father Daughter Day, illustrated and published. And I’m not even sure about the short story series I’ve started. Or the professional essays I’d like to publish.

So where am I the worse basket-case? In my accumulated books reading or my dreamed-of books for writing? Between the two I’m for sure quite busy.