Library

Believe it or not, that mess on the left actually represents progress. There hasn’t been a lot of that, at least in the library. I can see about a third of the bare floor now. I also know that, judging the remaining books with the remaining shelf space, the numbers just don’t work, and I can’t add more shelves…well, maybe one.

That’s for later. Part of the point of at least attempting to get organized is that I have a book to finish, a book set in a specific historical period and at a very important historical crisis point. In short, my references—and one specifically—were packed up, and I needed them. Not to get into many details, but there was a particular point in the story where Imperial and clan politics interacted in a very specific way, and in order to understand how that all fit into the narrative, I needed a specific book. That is, I thought I did. Until I was able to unpack said book.

Funny thing about that—what one person considers important, another just skims past. In other words, the book I was depending on was no help at all. I shouldn’t have been too surprised. What I was looking for was a fairly obscure series of events that happened over nine hundred years ago. Unless you happen to have a large university reference library at your disposal, you’re probably not going to find what you’re looking for. I don’t happen to have that. Nor do I have the shelf space to stock every reference I might possibly need, even if they did exist in translation, and usually the ebook edition in any language simply doesn’t exist.

What I do have is Google. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but online it took me maybe twenty minutes, tops, to track down what I was looking for, thanks to a Japanese site pulling from primary sources, with English translation provided. The internet does make some things more difficult with its constant distractions. But it also makes a lot of things possible. The information I needed simply wouldn’t have been available to me without it. Fortunately, I am not without it, so no problem.

Also no excuses. Funny how that works.