Used and abused, shiny and new, accumulating dust in an old Victorian basement or neatly packed in rows in a glass building downtown—whatever, I don’t care, I just want to read any books that make me feel, that trigger something other than boredom. For hours, stuck between the science fiction, horror, lit, fantasy and young adult sections, my hands and eyes can’t move fast enough. It’s like a drug, something that has become a part of me and won’t let go: I need books and always more books.

Stories, it’s all about who does what and when. What happens, what the characters learn, what we learn about ourselves through them. Entertaining, yes, but it’s so much more personal than that. I become friends and foes with some of these people the writers have created. I hate when something bad lurks around the corner and relish a good fight scene where the villain gets it in the nuts. I become involved with the characters, their stories become mine, for the length of a book. And if I’m really lucky, it stimulates ideas for a new story—hint, hint, Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist inspired the character Liriel in my novelette Misery of Me, published in Tattered Souls Volume 2 by The Cutting Block Press, available on Amazon.com August 1st.

I even travel across the border for good, used books, but sadly, I’ll be looking for a new pusher because the one I love, the Corner-Stone Bookshop in Plattsburgh, NY, is shutting down. Sad face, broken heart.

I also go to this huge bookstore near my home to feast on sales, tables of them, luring me in, tantalizing my want for distraction and, somehow, education. And I always give in, I have no power against a glossy hardcover or bendy paperback: I am that weak. When my stash starts to thin out, I know the time is coming to make a little trip to my ‘medicine’ supplier.

Whenever I open the door of a bookstore, I feel it in my veins: the possibility of reading something great, something that will change my view on things, which will leave a mark for a few days to a few years. If not forever.