Can a Book Actually be at My Finger Tips? How I Learned to Read Again!
I know it has been awhile, but I have been curling…. a ton.
This was the story of my college career. Both my undergraduate and graduate programs. Work full time and also go to school full time. I did have a ROTC scholarship at one point early in college, but it is a long story. Basically, because of sexism, sexual harassment, and jerk instructors, I left. There was no way I was going to sleep with someone to get some where.
So I had to work. Due to our lovely President and the Dot.com bust, I did not even have enough student loan money to cover the tuition for my graduate school. Yeah credit cards. So for almost 2 years after my college career, I had to work 2 full time jobs.
Even before I started to look like death warmed over, I had lost the passion to read. The desire to pick up a book and read it was not there. Even if I got so far as to open the first couple of pages, I got fidgety and felt very ADD like. This confession is like blasphemy in the English, Political Science, History, and teaching realms. But it was the way I felt.
I am not sure if it came from all the stuff I had to read in college. Political Science, English, and History is not what you would call light on reading. My time was so stretched I would get all the books before the quarter started and I would read them through quickly so could do a second quick read through during the quarter. I never had the time to do one in depth reading. I was going to school and working too much.
Or it could have been the exhaustion of just working to much. It was not to say I was not doing any reading. My teaching job had me reading at least 12 novels a year and tons of short stories and poems in between. But that is the same stuff over and over again.
And then something clicked last summer. Late last summer, I decided to read The Poison Wood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (her birthday was yesterday). It was in our honors curriculum and I was going to push my students to read it for outside reading. I thought I had better read it. The same day I finished that, I picked up Kite Runner. And the rest is history. All this school year I have read anywhere from 10 minutes to 3 hours before I go to bed. I have gotten back into the trashy romance novels I used to love as a teen. I can’t get enough. It is such a good feeling.
Any good author will tell you that if you want to write something and get it published, the first thing you need to do is read and write. Read as much as you can. This helps get the creative juices flowing. And lets face it, the more you write, the better writer you become. Hence this blog. I have always wanted to write a book. I have ideas floating around in my mind, and I love to tell verbal stories, but I could never really think of anything concrete. Last summer, I even started to write some poetry. I was really desperate to try and get anything substantial down.
This morning as I was laying in bed (cursing I was up so early when I did not have to be because I am on spring break), I think I have created a foundation for my book. I even sat down before this blog and started to sketch things out. I can not just sit and write, I need to have some framework and go from there. I think this could actually be something people would want to read. I think I can put things together that make sense. We will just have to see. I can not help but wonder if this break in ideas, form, and creation could not have been from my reading.
