Welcome to #CheckIn for Wednesday, September 8th

It’s International Literacy Day, and the third and last day of Rosh Hashanah (Hebrew: רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה‎), literally meaning "head [of] the year", is the Jewish New Year. L'shanah tovah tikatev v'taihatem to all observing.

It’s my last day as moderator this round. Cass M is scheduled to take it from here.

Anyone who knows me at all knows I’m willfully and habitually a reader. Books are my drug of choice. I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, but I do read, and a lot. I check out an average of two books a month from the library, have an open account at my local independent bookstore, (also have an Amazon wish list that directs friends and family to shop there,) belong to a book club that meets once a month, (virtually now, for over a year-and-a-half,) and piles of books yet to be read, stacked by genre. Then there’s the graphic novels, print and online, just like all the news sources I follow.

You’d think someone who reads as much and as widely as I do would be a better writer, but no. I struggle over every line, because the Coleridgian concept that prose is words in their best order, burns like a flaming beacon in the back of my head (right next to that whirling acid-induced mandala that never seems to go away,) causing me to torture myself over things that are best said plainly, as if to “talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.”

I started writing a story about a Mexican girl from a crypto-Jewish family fleeing the revolution and finally coming to rest in pre-WWI Los Angeles. I’ve finished other stories while trying to make headway on this one, but I’m stuck in Juarez, like that Dylan song. It’s like the creative vein I was mining ran out there, Pancho Villa and Sam Dreben notwithstanding. I don’t know how writers like Neil Gaiman or Stephen King do it. It’s like magic to me, how they seem to conjure stories out of nowhere.

So I guess the question here is, do you enjoy reading, and if so what? Any favorite authors you return to time and again? Of course any other topic is fine per usual.

Original Art by Brendan Monroe for NYT | Motion Effects by rexisky 

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