The Geek and Inkwell

In the not-too-distant past, I came to a point in my writing life where I was feeling so squished under the weight of the huge, laborious, scary, exposing undertaking that is writing a novel that I either had to come up with a new way to approach the task or give up entirely on ever finishing it. The thing is, by nature, a writer takes themselves very seriously. Often too seriously. Every time I sat down at my computer to write, the very first thought in my head would be: Now, this better be good. Not just good - it better be profound and moving. Otherwise what business do you have thinking that people anywhere will want to read what you have to say? Needless to say, I felt a little pressured and inadequate. I felt like one of those cave-explorers in the movies who has found an uncharted crack in the rock and decides to see where it leads, then eventually wriggles too far in and gets hopelessly wedged between millions of tons of rock. (I know that sounds dramatic, but that's h...

Thanks,  @feliciaday  for bringing our attention to these, and thanks, Oxboxer , for being so clever. I suppose you would have to play Skyrim to understand, but I think they are just hilarious. Created by Oxboxer   Created by  Oxboxer Created by Oxboxer   Created by  Oxboxer

My friends, both at work and in other circles, are kind enough to lend me books on a very regular basis. I know that when they lend me books, it is because that book impressed them, and they want to share the experience with me. This is what good friends do for each other. That being said, a couple weeks ago, I was thrilled when I returned the last book I had borrowed, because it meant that for the first time in a long time, I was free to begin reading any book of my choosing. Now, I was an English major, and I am a writer, and a writer's best fuel is usually reading, so this means that my  Goodreads  "To read" list is always about 80 times as long as my "Read" list. There really isn't an end in sight to the list of stories that I want to crack open and devour. But you have to start somewhere. So I took a very graciously gifted bookstore gift card, headed down to said bookstore just as giddy as can be, and headed straight for my pre-selected targets.

Although it didn't work out in the end, I began my time at university (I like to say "at university" because it sounds so much more sophisticated than "college...") as a film major. My interest in film making first developed in high school, when I decided I might want to be a screenwriter, but the love I have for analyzing films and my appreciation for the varied subtleties of the art form continues to this day, I believe, thanks to a sparsely populated little class I took at my local community college called Intro to Film. I don't even know if that class is held anymore - I think it's been split up into classes on foreign film masterpieces, American film masterpieces, etc. But eight years ago, it was held in the college theatre in the afternoon. Intro to Film was my last class of the school day, and it was like my reward for making it through the monotony of statistics, the ludicrousness of what we actually spent time reviewing in English 1A, and so on....