wham! right in the head!

[truepenny]

So I'm dragging my weary way through Chapter 9 of The Virtu (be glad I haven't been posting--it would be wall-to-wall whining) and needed, a few minutes ago, to double-check something in Mélusine. I went into the study (from the dining room, where I have the CEM spread out over the dining room table and under the occasional cat) and got my reading copy of Mélusine off the shelf (the 'reading copy' being the one I do readings out of and take to cons as my visual aid, the one I'm not allowed to have a cow about if it gets a little battered) and was taking it back out to the battlefield table, when it suddenly hit me.

I wrote this book.

(Amazing, Holmes! How do you do it?)

But it was there, just for a moment, that sudden disassociation between me and the book in my hands--I think because carrying a book from room to room is something I do every day, several times a day even, and it's so completely normal that for a second Mélusine was just one of the hundreds of books in this house, like a thesaurus or a mystery novel or a cookbook. And then, all at once, it wasn't, because I remembered something I'd never forgotten in the first place:

I wrote this book.

It's like my book-lover-self turned a corner and walked smack into my writer-self. And then realized she'd walked into a mirror.

I have been thrown completely for a loop. By a perfectly familiar fact.

It may be a while before I can concentrate again.

Comments

[touch-of-ink.livejournal.com]

That sounds wonderfully cool!

[rosefox]

That's so awesome. *)

I saw Mélusine in the bookstore yesterday and said "Hey, I read her LJ!". And then didn't buy it, I confess, because our book budget is very limited right now; but I thought of you all the same.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I found that I didn't get used to it.
I just got used to riding out the weird mirror-boggle moment.
You describe it very well.
Mine sometimes has a bit of almost-nausea and disorientation to go with it, as if I'd stood up too quickly--which suggests all kinds of interesting ideas about alternate universes and so on.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've had that, usually when I'm looking something up in the book. I have it more often with paperbacks, maybe because they seem more like real books to me. The weirdest was with the Chinese version of T&C, here is this book-object I can't even read the alphabet of, and I wrote it.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Wow! Sounds great. Don't worry about concentrating :-)

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Hee!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

Aw, I love you and I love your books. ::sappy!::