I’m in the process of updating the look of my site, so please pardon my dust. It’s not complete yet, but it’s pretty close. So hopefully if I commit to it publicly, in the next week or so I can get the rest of the visuals all nice and pretty. Don’t get me wrong, I love the new template anyway, but it’s missing something more…personalized. So with any luck we’ll all see that soon.

So, you know how everyone always says “Writers Read”? And how we’re all told to read in our genre? And all that kind of rhetoric? And maybe how, if you’ve been around here for a little while, you know I don’t ‘read in my genre’ because most urban fantasy and paranormal romance makes me wince and slam my head into the books I’m reading? I do like some authors. Please don’t think it’s a knock against the genre’s as a whole, but it takes work for me to find the really good books.

So…Friday I went a little eBook nuts. I don’t have an eReader, but I have this spiffy little phone with an Android OS on it, that lets me have all sorts of eReader software. So I downladed Google Books and the Kindle app.

And then started grabbing stuff from Amazon. Not a lot of stuff. I grabbed a couple of books from authors whose blogs I follow. That was spiffy. I grabbed a couple more that looked like they might be interesting. I scanned the first few pages of those – the random picks – and couldn’t get into them. I’d be like ‘read, read, ooh, shiny…, read, rea…what?’

I went through three books like that. Fortunately, they were $.99 books and not from authors I know, so I don’t have to tell them their books didn’t hold my attention. The thing is, they were well-written, I could tell that much. But suddenly I found it so hard to care whether or not Sally Jo Marriweather liked her new school clothes or her old ones better.

At this point, my attention wandered back to Amazon. I started thinking “You know what I liked a lot? Microserfs. A story about people who work in the industry I do and have gone through a lot of the same things I have, and blah, blah, blah.” And I decided to play a game I call link hopping. You pull up something – anything, it doesn’t have to be on Amazon, it can be on someone’s blog – and you click on a link that looks interesting but takes you somewhere else.

On Friday I did this with Douglas Coupland. I clicked into his book ‘Generation X’. Which looked okay, but the concept didn’t really grab me. But I saw people describing it as a combination of ‘Fight Club’ by Chuck Palahniuk and ‘Less than Zero’ by Bret Easton Ellis. I’m a big fan of Palahniuk, but I’ve read a lot of his stuff and wasn’t in the mood that day. So I followed the Less than Zero link, read the description and said “Why does this sound familiar?” And then realized Bret Easton Ellis wrote ‘American Psycho’.

Trippy, screwed up concept. And like Palahnuik, more graphic than I was in the mood for. So this went on for a while. Jumping from one male litarary author to the next until I discovered someone I’d heard of before – everyone has I think – but had never read just because I hadn’t. Kurt Vonnegut. Not ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, because where would the fun be in reading the same book everyone’s read? ‘Cat’s Cradle’. And I was hooked. Absolutely engrossed from the first chapter. I blew through more than half of it in just a couple of hours.

I read, and I started connecting the dots of my own psyche, and figuring out I might be having a problem writing because I’m not writing what I like to read, I’m writing what I’d like to pretend I like to read.

That wasn’t confusing, right?

I’ve been trying to conform my voice and style to fit something that isn’t actually me. Once again, don’t misunderstand. There are talented authors in all genres and I’ll read them regardless. And I think everyone should read what they enjoy, whether or not it’s something I like. I mean, enjoy your leisure activities ^_^

However, we did conclude that this revelation doesn’t make me enjoy David Brinn, Frank Herbert, or JRR Tolkien any more than I did before. All three men are amazingly talented writers who have built brilliantly complex worlds…and they like to write about those worlds. In detail. Great. Extended. Somtimes excruciating. Detail.

I suspect from the way people talk that most of you already know your preferred genre to both read and write in. You’re comfortable with urban fantasy, or YA contemporary, or historical romance, or science fiction, or any and all of it. So I have to wonder…did you always know? Did it take a lot of trial and error to figure out what genre you enjoyed writing in, or were you fortunate enough to stumble on that delectible gem early on in life?