Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Busy with stuff.

BOOKS. Favorite books tend to come in clumps. I have a place where all my Jungian books are. I have Jung's Collected Works and also books by various Jungian authors I've collected over the years. I include some authors here that are not technically Jungian, but who write along those lines: dreams, art, the unconscious, etc.

I have an area that is poetry. Anthologies, collections, chap books. Off beat writers as well as convention, mainstream folks in the canon. My current favorites are TS Eliot and Rumi. We have collections of Shakespeare, Hemingway, and I have a bunch of shelves of my favorite classics literature (I studied this in college).

We have an area for textbooks, one for music and some shelves dedicated to favorite children's literature. We have a vast collection of history. Fiction is scattered all over the house. My husband has a few shelves for Science Fiction. And two of his beloved 1st editions. We each have a stack on our nightstands, and we both also have a Kindle!

Why? Because we love to read, to write and to re-read and to refer to.

RECORDS. These are my husbands. They consist of hundreds of classical records that he collected in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's. Also everything by Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis and the MJQ. Then there are CD Box sets of all of the operas we have ever seen, and some we want to see. We have multiple recordings of everything by Wagner and multiple copies of Mozart's operas as well.

He is a big fan of vinyl, but when he contracted Rheumatoid Arthritis his hand began to shake a bit and it made for some rough needle handling. So he moved into CDs. Not as good for serious listening, but better than silence and better than scratched records.

The biggest change in records taste is our mutual love of Opera - neither of us was a fan before we got married. In books - I think we have more spiritual books now than we'd ever imagined we would own.

WRITING BOX. It is a beautiful and simple wooden box (mahogany?) that my grandfather kept his correspondence and writing materials in when he was alive. It now contains the last of his stationary and my grandmother's childhood diary. I thought it was lost.

WRITING. For me it starts with an idea and I flesh out various aspects in short stories. To see if the characters stand. I then write snippets and make an arc of the story ... I put notes up on the wall... I add lines that come to me and facts about the characters. After a while they end up with birthdays and tattoos and quirks and I have to keep track of them. The hardest thing is when something terrible happens to a character and I am bowled over by it in my life.

Right now I'm kind of stuck because I've been grieving the suicide of a character. I know I wrote it. But in writing from his mother's standpoint afterward I have been simply griefstricken.

To get into a character who is very different from me I people watch (airports, big cities, coffee shops) and I steal peoples' looks and snatches of their conversations. I have been on trains with people talking on the phone and their story (that I didn't ASK them to say in my hearing) finds its way into the character's mouth or in the make up of a character.

CROSS COUNTRY TRIP. The worst part of the trip was when my tires were getting very, very bald and we ended up on this shale covered track at the top of a mountain trying to go over a pass (my GPS lady said we could) into Sun Valley, ID and yet there was a sign saying WARNING! Not Suitable For Cars. We were, according to the fucking GPS 3 miles from our next stop. We had to backtrack and drive 127 miles around the mountain ridge to get there!

The detour was actually great - we met some people, had some nice coffee, saw some rivers and mountains we would have missed. But those 25 minutes we sat there weighing the options sucked.

GREECE. I studied Classics in college. Got my masters in Humanities and simply thrill to the literature of Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles. I love Plato. Don't really get all of Aristotle, but that doesn't stop me from trying. I would love to soak up the Greek ethos for a month or a year and learn the language and eat the food and just be there.

I have visited some of the islands but for FAR too short of a visit... and I have not been to Crete... and many others.

Thanks for asking. This has been fun.