2015 – The Year of Balance and Finishing Things
The library in my elementary school was half the size of a classroom, but as full of books as they could make it. Still I’d read nearly every book in it before I escaped to middle school and more books. In middle school and high school, I read a book a day most days. I read through the middle school library in just over a year, and the kind librarians let me into the high school section early so I wouldn’t starve for books. On a rare trip to the county library I looked like a contestant in one of those “all you can stuff in the cart in ten minutes” contest winners. When I got home I always needed help with my stack of treasure—especially since I was generally eyebrows deep in the first book while I tried to carry the rest. In those years, pretty much if I wasn’t reading, I was writing. I had an old electric typewriter on a table in my room, and a bunch of notebooks for when I needed to hide somewhere else (and a 35-acre farm full of places to do the hiding!) and I loved to write the stories that I couldn’t find to read. (Stories I can now identify as self-insert Hardy Boys fanfic? Yeaaahhhh…there might be a reason that stuff wasn’t in the library.)