Yes, these bottles are all from my own personal collection, and yes, they do have something to do with romance fiction.

Granted, in the periods where I set most of my stories (roughly from the end of the Wars of the Roses to the end of the American Revolution/War for Independence (depending on which side one is on in that one)) nail polish did not exist. I shudder to think what a time traveling heroine would do if she jumped to an earlier era before nail polish remover with a full manicure from her own time. Chips give me the heebie-jeebies like nobody's business.

Okay, fine, but what does that have to do with romance fiction? I'll point you to the caption. A friend has dubbed the container where I keep my polishes as "the shelter" because there are all those lovely things crying out "pick me, pick me" every time I open the lid, but no matter how many of them, no matter how creamy or sparkly or pale or dark or bright or neutral they are, I only have ten toes. I can only wear one at a time. In the rare cases that I do paint my fingernails, we can expand it to two, but usually only one.

This weekend, I attended a library book sale with my friend Maria Louisa (new to the blogosphere, go say hi to her here) and we both came back with more than a couple of volumes each. To be added to the more than a couple of volumes each we both snagged on our UBS run the week before. Which were added to the TBR mountain ranges in both of our homes. You see the problem here.

As part of my mojo restoration project for this fall, I'm making finding time to read a priority. Some authors prefer not to read in-genre while writing, but I'm contrary. Give me gobs of historical romance, preferably big thick bug-squasher books with loads of angst and adventure on the way to happily ever after. The settings and plots and types of characters vary, and I do fully intend to have at least a crack at everything in the TBR, but as with the limited number of toes, there are a limited amount of hours in the day. Limited further still by the time that must be spent writing, doing art, caring for the four legged furry contingent, keeping domestic sanitary conditions bearable, and the like. One could argue that the bookcases are their own shelters. We will save the discussion of ideas to be written and works in progress for another entry, but the spirit is the same. Thankfully, with reading, I can work in higher multiples; a book for my purse, one for the tub, one by the bed, etc. How many do you read at a time?