Reason Number One Million I Should Not Be Given Money

is that I always spend it on books. ALWAYS. Hello, my socks have holes in them all over and I need a new jacket and I'm not even really making enough to pay my bills right now, but the minute I get my hands on money it goes straight into the bookcase.

At least I had some excuse this time. It was a gift card, so it's not like I could actually SAVE the money. And anyway, I'm back on a reading kick. I've been neglecting my reading & writing for a while now, what with the holidays and stress over graduate school applications. And there's nothing like buying new books to reinvigorate the "I want to read and write forever!" part of my mind.

Just cracked open my new copy of Bradbury Stories, a compilation of 100 of Ray Bradbury's best short stories. Am completely in love so far. The only other Ray Bradbury I've ever read was Fahrenheit 451, and I only read that because I had to in order to pass 10th grade English. So I couldn't really count myself as a Bradbury fan. A friend of mine (whose literary taste I tend to agree with) is in love with him, though, and ever since moving out to L.A. he's been put back on my literary map, so when I saw this volume of short stories I immediately got excited for it. In his introduction, he says that the way he writes is to "jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down." I'm very bad at that. I tend to want to build the wings first, and then I'm stuck at the top of the cliff putting these wings together for days and days, and the more I look at the wings the more I think they're really not QUITE good enough, and even after they become acceptably functional I tend to want to perfect the look of the feathers and the color that they take when the light glances off of them, and then before you know it it's dark outside and I decide I'll have to wait for the morning to actually jump, and of course I never do.

The whole process is a little easier when writing poetry, which is probably why it's the only genre of writing that I've successfully written in. I mean, I've written a few short stories, but nothing that I'd feel comfortable actually showing to people. Perhaps I need to be more Ray Bradbury about my writing if I want to get into fiction.