I’m a teacher by profession but I want to be a writer, which is why I maintain this blog, go to open mike poetry readings, and have approximately 1,000 more writers on my facebook page than I should have.
I never read any of their books – first off, being both somewhat stretched financially in the current economic situation and also a cheapskate by nature at the best of times, I don’t like to spend money on books, especially as there are so many ways to obtain books for free, and so many truly great, famous, important books I haven’t read yet. People have been writing books for the last 1,000 years or so, and a single lifetime is not enough to get through all of them.
Love it or STFU
Secondly, a lot of them are female romance/erotic writers, and it’s not exactly my genre.
There are poets there, too, and sometimes I read the stuff they post, but seldom what they link to. Not only is life too short, but the days are too short. I haven’t been able to get through everything on my facebook page for ages. I read somewhere recently that there are more people writing now than reading, and I believe that.
Secondly, though, there’s a whole hell of a lot of it that I don’t understand. It’s too literary and most of it doesn’t rhyme. I write a lot of poetry, and I tend to be very entertained by my own work, but there are a whole lot of people out there who know more about it than I do.
That said, there was a bit of a discussion a few minutes ago in which people were saying things like “Sure, Cloud Atlas was an interesting book but it wasn’t particularly well written,” and they were saying the same kind of thing about J.K. Rowling.
Bullshit. The mark of a well designed car is if it gets you from point A to point B in comfort and safety, the mark of a well prepared meal is if it tastes good, and the mark of a good book is whether or not it’s good to read. So, don’t go saying J.K. Rowling is not a great writer in front of me.
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