When a Book is a Book; and Corn, Corn.

I remember reading a book review one summer while I was home from college. I had decided to attempt, in 2.5 months, to read my way through the entire chronology of the English language's most influential works of Fantasy. Which happened. And it was pretty much all that happened that summer, considering most of those books are the size of cereal boxes.

I read a lot of words. Which is ironic, because:

Of all the words in all the books I read, the line I remember most didn't come from a published novel, but from that short, scathing book review. It was a very old review, reviewing an even older book. I can't even remember which one... Well at the End of the World? The Faerie Queene?

What I do remember is the highlight of the review:

 "Words, words! It's a veritable word factory!"

And I think I sat there for a minute, reading it again and again. Because

yeah, dude

it's a book.

In all likelihood, he was just trying to imply that the book was pedantic. Even so, that phrase always stuck with me. Words, words... how dare you novel, how dare you have so many words.

If you haven't already noticed, I'm the type of person who writes a lot. When I edit, somehow more words get added then cut, getting exponentially greater with every change. It's everything I can do to keep a single blog post from taking over the universe. In my mind, there will never be enough time to share all the things we could possible share with each other in all the ways we could possibly share them. And that annoys me.

But often what annoys other people -- are people like me. The word long-winded comes to mind. And anytime I go to compose something, whether an email, a blog post, or the next chapter, it's these people that haunt me. My fear of them used to be nearly debilitating.

They're judging me, I think, get to the point. They're bored. I'm boring them. They don't care. Your metaphors are stupid. Shut up.

But these days, when those feelings rise up, I just remind myself: 

Chill --
remember when dude got pissed because a book was a book?

Because, inevitably, somewhere somebody is going to get upset about something.

Yes, I'm wordy. This blog is bloggy. And wordy. With lots of words. And bad language. Bad language, too, even. 

However, all jokes aside (and in retrospective pity for one angry 1900's dude) I will try to give other things a chance to be themselves, without words. Or be pictures of themselves, at least.

So without further a word: