Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you are enjoying yourself, whether you’re surrounded by loved ones (and hopefully opening many bookish presents!) or curled up by yourself with a favorite book. My husband and I plan to go see Aquaman today (cos that’s a present for both of us!) and have a feast of Chinese food.

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. She has a list on her page of everyone participating each week, so go check out all the other participating blogs! This week’s topic is “Books I Hope I Find Under My Christmas Tree This Morning” because Christmas, obviously!

We celebrate Christmas, but we don’t really do surprises – and we rarely wait until Christmas to give gifts to one another. (It’s just my husband and I here.) So I’ve already received my gifts – a beautiful scarf and writer’s gloves, printed with e.e. cummings’ poem “I Carry Your Heart.” My version of the Top Ten Tuesday will simply be a book wish list instead. There might be a bit of a theme, as I’m getting back into the creative writing I used to do a lot of in high school and college.

Writing Monsters, Wonderbook, and Violence: A Writer’s Guide are all books useful for writing fantasy, which is what my short stories usually are. I flipped through Writing Monsters and Wonderbook at Barnes & Noble recently, and definitely want those. There’s several books about writing fight scenes, but Violence apparently also gets into the psychology of people who get violent, so that sounds interesting.

There’s a series of writer’s thesauruses that I’d really like to collect all of; I have The Emotion Thesaurus, and I really want the Emotional Wound Thesaurus. The other four – the Positive Trait, Negative Trait, Rural Setting, and Urban Setting Thesauruses would also be useful to have around.

After all the books on writing, I’d love to own a copy of Educated: A Memoir and Rage Becomes Her. I’ve already read them both, but would really like to own them.

Can’t wait to see what other people want to read vs. what they want to own!