Thank goodness for my book club and our Tuesday meetings! I wasn’t quite finished with the reading section for this week, so today was pretty easy to get my two hours in. Having the deadline put the pressure on (and having to be accountable to the book club gang helped too).

It also helped that I picked up the book first thing in the morning and read for about thirty minutes before I did anything else. I know it has become a cliche to talk about the “miracle morning” or whatever the productivity gurus call it, but there’s a lot of truth to getting things done first thing in the morning. Even if I only read for ten minutes, or work on my fiction for a minute or two, or edit a page for a client, if I do it first thing in the morning, the rest of the day goes so much better. No matter what happens in the afternoon or evening, if I work a little bit on all my projects and challenges in the morning, the day feels successful. I also end up working more throughout the day because I’ve already jumped started everything in the morning.

The book club book this time around is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Highly recommended. It’s historical literary fiction, which is a genre I don’t read often, but whenever I do, I end up enjoying it. Historical fiction is great for fantasy and science fiction writers to read and study because the attention to detail and world-building often demonstrate the same skills a speculative fiction author needs to have. 1930s Korea and Japan are as unfamiliar to me as a secondary world in a fantasy novel might be. I love how Min Jin Lee is able to make the world come alive in my imagination. Very vivid writing, and the plot and characters are highly engaging. I’m about 200 pages into it so far, and frankly, I didn’t want to stop reading earlier this evening when I finished the section we were assigned for book club.

Basically, I know what I’ll be doing first thing tomorrow morning. Gotta find out what happens to Sunja, Yoseb, and Kyunghee!