Welcome back, reader! Watson and I appreciate your return – or maybe this is your first time here. If so, do come in and stay a while! We’ve got mood boards and story concepts, some pretty pictures to go with each page, and a few (growing) blog posts. Feel free to nose around and see what we’re about, and then come back here to read my (Holfelder) thoughts On Reading.

I attended the Writer’s Conference of Northern Appalachia this past weekend. It was cathartic (I cried), productive (I wrote), and informative (I learned). Perhaps someday the little piece I wrote will make it onto this website, but right now, it needs some tinkering and time to grow. It’s also very personal, and the reason that I cried. 

However, in a marketing session that I attended, the writer was talking about how to structure one’s social media presence to pull in readers and not only fellow writers. While we support each other as writers, and often buy each other’s books, in the long run, we also need readers. One way to pull in readers is to write about reading, rather than writing (which attracts writers only). So…here are some thoughts on reading, as a writer.

I burned out on reading in my junior year of undergraduate college (where I Did Not train in the Fine Arts, surprisingly enough). Reading educational textbooks, churning out proofs and solving calculus equations left me very little brain space for reading. For the better part of the last ten years, I’ve struggled to pick up a book and stick with it.

This has left me incredibly sad, and even a bit ashamed. I used to love reading. I spent most of my childhood in a book – to the extent that my parents criticised me for spending so much time there (that’s a topic for therapy). Yet now, I struggle to engross myself in a book.

Part of it is an infernal pickiness which I want to tear apart and destroy. If the slightest thing is “off” – an undefined vibe that only the recesses of my brain understand – it yanks me out of the world and back onto the physical page, destroying my ability to remain inside the world that the author has created. This frustrates me, as I know and truly believe that few books get it “just right” and that’s okay. 

A larger part, though, as to do with the fact that who I am, at least on the surface, has changed drastically. At 18, I was an evangelical, conservative Christian, intent on finding a husband and having five kids within the next seven or so years. At 32, I am a queer aroace agender lesbian, essentially a pagan, married with three cats, a dog, and no desire for my own children (though I still love kids). I’m more my true self, but it does mean that I don’t know what I like to read.

Queer, I know that. But beyond…do I like fantasy/magic – genres that were mostly forbidden in my conservative household – or do I like things grounded in reality? Do I like to read what I write or do I want something completely fresh? 

I don’t know. 

I’ve known that I don’t appreciate lots of sex or schmoopy romance on the page (no hate!). As an aroace individual, who is a bit repulsed by both, these can pull me out of a book and toss me across the room. Yet, I want adult stakes in my books – danger, intrigue, real adult problems. Finding those has been hard, nay, impossible, as I’m afraid to crack open a book and end up in someone else’s sex scene. No, really, if I’m not prepared, it really messes me up!

Watson and I are doing our own little “book club” to try to give me some external motivation to get me over the activation energy hump. We started with the Scholomance books by Naomi Novik, which I am enjoying. Magic intrigues me, and it’s also important to read a comp for our WIPS.

Then came comps for Life, Love & the Monongahela Murders. Oh no. I haven’t read anything in the  crime/mystery genre since the Hardy Boys (which I loved). Bless Watson, she discovered the Evander Mills mystery series by Lev A. C. Rosen. I have fallen in love with this series. It’s historical, gritty and noir, but not dark. It’s hopeful. And it’s unapologetically queer. While sex is mentioned, it does not occur on screen (at least in Lavender House, I have yet to read the others), and is discussed in a way that doesn’t affect me negatively. It’s engaging and fun, meaty in a way that I appreciate. The story has something to say, and it’s something that I agree with. 

It feels a bit like Joe Hardy (my favorite) grew up, came out, and ended up in San Francisco as a cop. 

With Lavender House, I was able to finish a book for the first time in two years. I finished it in a matter of days and promptly bought the second book. It’s indeed a good comp for LL&MM, but it’s also just a great read. I feel…good, refreshed, reconnected to the world of writing and reading in a way I haven’t been for a long time. 

What’s my point, then? I suppose I’m just here to commiserate. If you, too, have struggled to read – burnt out from life, love and the mon– nope, wrong phrase. If you, too, have burnt out from, well, *gestures at the world*, know that it doesn’t make you less of a reader. It makes you human. And as humans, the cool thing is that we can pick ourselves up and start again.

So here’s to you, reader, and to the next book that your tentative fingers (or ears – audiobooks count! as! reading!) decide to reach for. May the reading be kind to you and may you find solace in between the pages of a book that feels like home.