Being a Reader
I’ve heard it a thousand times in different articles and interviews with Authors I admire, if you want to write you have to steep yourself in the written word. I’ve taken these words very much to heart and I read, all the time. In fact it’s a joke amongst friends and family that it is almost impossible to find me without a book – I keep one in my purse, I pack extras to take on trips, I have one in my car in case it breaks down and I don’t have my purse. (Of course I also probably would be without my driver’s license which seems like a bad idea, but I digress.) I do love books.
The thing about books is that they change you, well the good ones do. I was reminded of that this morning.
I was getting ready for work this morning and I noticed that there was a lovely creeping fog hanging around the house – I was immediately transported to Stephen King’s The Mist. I started to feel a little uneasy as I looked at that fog wondering what could be moving behind the curtain of grey moisture. It was completely childish, the dogs had been in and out without so much as a bark, surely if there had been some nightmarish prehistoric creature the dogs would’ve at least barked.
The uneasy feeling gnawed at the back of my mind and when I headed out the door, I found myself trying to move a little faster to get from the house to the car. (Yes because clearly a car would be a great defense against fog filled with pterodactyls and other nightmares.) In my haste, I walked face first into a spider web and a sense of fear and panic thicker the fog began to close around me.
I waited to see a giant spider, roughly the size of a medium size dog, moving towards me with pinchers dripping, waiting to paralyze me with venom, wrap me up in webbing for later. (Yes, let’s completely ignore the fact that a spider of that size would have a web much much bigger than the one I was brushing away from my face.)
To the casual observer, I imagine I appeared to only pause for a moment but in truth, every second while I contemplated my death by giant mutant spider was excruciatingly long. When I was safely in my car and there were a few miles away between me and the spider web, I was finally able to chuckle a little and feel just a tiny bit sheepish about the whole experience.
An hour later I am appreciative of the man who crafted a story that fifteen or twenty years later can still make my heart skip a beat in fear.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,…The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons
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