Besides doing a great deal of writing as an undergrad, the other thing I did -- in my memory, it was constantly -- was read. During one semester, I was taking five lit classes, which obviously entailed a lot of reading, but I was also dedicated to reading at least one novel or story collection each week.

Francine Prose writes:

"Only once did my passion for reading steer me in the wrong direction, and that was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it har dto understand what they did love, exactly" (Reading Like a Writer 8).

I thought of this quote again today, and I thought it was important, because this book is one of the major reasons that I simply didn't give up on writing altogether after my novel was shitcanned. This quote helped me feel better -- not okay, not alright, not good, but better -- about the fact that I have largely stopped reading for pleasure during my Ph.D. program, and the texts I did read were often more like chores than learning experiences. Even when I did find time to read, I would feel enormous guilt that I wasn't bettering myself by working on my pedagogy or, at least, reading theory.

But I'm reading again for pleasure, but also for practice. I'm reading The Day of the Jackal, because I am working on a collaborative spy novel. But I'm also reading blogs and articles online. I'm reading lectures and facebook threads. I'm reading several novels right now and each of them, specifically, to learn something as a writer, true, but also for the pleasure of learning something, the way a child enjoys learning.

Maybe that's too kind to myself, to suggest that I'm childlike -- Thoreau said something akin to "I've never been as wise as the day I was first born" -- but I'm being kind to myself right now, and I'm just going to have to deal with that.