10 Comments

Thankyou very much for the “Witches” and the “Doors”! My wife and I, both seventyish, were deeply moved by your conjuring! We read them aloud together and loved them!

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Jan 23, 2023·edited Jan 24, 2023

For what it's worth, our lives--your readers, that is--are incredibly enriched by the stories you've exchanged with us and in which we've become irrevocably enmeshed.

Creating art is a weird thing. Especially commercial art. I can't pretend to know exactly how you feel, and I certainly haven't achieved anything close to your level of success, but I can say you're not alone in the battle of heart-versus-head in trying to just...write. To connect with a feeling or a place or a time or an experience and share it communally in the most solitary way.

We appreciate you, your words, and your stories. The rest is just noise.

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Thinking about our dog getting older and slowing down and crying with you.

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Jan 29, 2023·edited Jan 29, 2023

HI Alix,

A friend loaned me The Ten Thousand Doors of January which I devoured. Loved it. I have since read A Spindle Splintered - also fabulous. I can't wait to read more!

I love that you kept a reading journal. I have kept a notebook of every book I have ever read since 1977 although I only write down the name of the book, the author and a rating such as good, excellent, brilliant. Your books of course rated a brilliant. :-)

It's a very tattered book now and I had to start a new one in 2016. I can tell so much about what was happening in my life by the number of books, the types of books, when I'd discovered a new author and read all their books at once, and oh how my writing has changed over the years. There's still some books that I vividly remember and how much I enjoyed them comes back to me just reading the title. I would be so lost without reading.

I write short stories and have had a few published so I also understand writer's block and how life just gets in the way!

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The fog machine line is brilliant and made me laugh.

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"i've been in a little bit of a writing slump, lately. i mean, i'm writing, because it's my job and i have deadlines, but slowly, somewhat mechanically. i don't feel like an author trying to tell a good story; i feel like a content-maker trying to make good content so that people on the internet will give my content five stars and i will get paid to make more content. i'm not doing magic; i'm just putting on a magic show."

This sounds to me like a parent with small children. Or perhaps it sounds to me like me when my children were small. Anyway, I don't know that yours are small; wikipedia only tells me that there are two, and because it also tells me your age, I can surmise. In my case, they got bigger and many things got better, including some things that I hadn't even known had gotten worse. Work things and writing thnigs got to be less mechanical again. I can't promise that real magic will return to your magic show when you begin to get more sleep and when their attention spans lengthen, but it's the way to bet.

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I started a reading journal this year too. Thanks to Illumicrate that sent a book journal that's easy to feel out and makes me happy to see all I read in one notebook.

Though I also have a couple of excels with the books I read and the stars they get, it feels a lot less personal.

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impeccable relatability as always 💚 I’ve been feeling a similar distance from that wonder of reading so thanks for making me feel not so alone! Reading The Book Eaters rn and I will try my best to sink my teeth deeper and savor. Also the color list is A LIFESAVER THANK YOU

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Just have to say — oh, deerskin. That book rocked my world back in the day, and when I reread it years later. Maybe I should revisit again. Nothing more profound to say just, thank you for making the reading magic for us, and reminding us of the magic of reading too.

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The Six Deaths of the Saint is great!

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