I'm trying

[Janet Ortegon]

I tried yesterday to find the books that my friends on Crimespace have written. At the library, of course -- I have neither the budget nor the space to justify buying every book I want to read. What I discovered was that in this case, I'll have to buck up and buy if I want to read such things as "Death Will get You Sober" and "The Sex Club." With titles like that, why wouldn't I? So that'll be my next project.

Well, not project exactly. Buying books I seriously want to read isn't a project. Projects are things like figuring out how to get my lawn tilled up and removed so I can start it over, or overcoming my many hesitations and opening up the half-done book I put away three years ago when I had to go back to work full time. THOSE are projects.

In the meantime, I'm halfway through Sue Grafton's alphabet and I've got a whole stack of other books to dive into after "K is for Killer." I've read them all before -- those Kinsey Millhone mysteries -- but it was a long time ago and I'm enjoying them just as much the second time around.

At what point, though, does reading the work of people you admire keep you from creating your own stuff? The more I read, and the more impressed I get, the more intimidated I get. That's a bad thing. I have a story to tell too, I just have to come out of my literary shell long enough to tell it.