If you’re one of those people who easily empathize with the characters in the books you’re reading, consider yourself lucky. I have been a voracious reader all my life, and yet, that is one thing that I’ve never really been able to do well.
I bought a Kobo e-reader today. For those of you who know only the Kindle, there are other e-readers, including the Barnes & Noble NOOK (which B&N assures us is not dead), and the Kobo E-Reader line. The Kobo comes in a couple of different forms; I got a Kobo Aura H2O, second edition. It’s extremely hackable and entirely open, which means that if I put my works-in-progress on it, I can use it to check for typos, and extract the database to my editor as a revision guide.
The Kobo immediately made the statement that “Elf M. Sternberg” was my favorite author; I had more books by that guy than any other, and I’ve been reading them steadily. This led me to joke that the Kobo isn’t wrong: I am my favorite author, and I comfort-read my own stuff a lot.
My own stories are part of my thinking process. They’re how I learned how to deal with the world, they’re how I reasoned about how human beings behaved. I would look or listen to something friends, acquaintances, or even media people were going through and try to reason out, “What’s going on in their minds that they got to this position?” And then I would write stories that tried to put content around that reasoning.
So when I was reading The Delicate Relationship between Grief and Fanfiction, tried hard to understand what Lynn Zubernis was saying when she said:
… because I don’t get that at all reading other people’s stuff. Of course, I tend to have four books “in flight” at any given time: a programming book, a non-fiction book that’s not about programming, a fiction book by someone else, and my WIPs. And yet none of that really resonates the way Zubernis said it did. I read my stuff for the same reason some people like looking in a mirror, at least it’s a familiar face looking back at you. It’s someone you understand. And I’ll probably never understand other people as well as I want.
I bought a Kobo e-reader today. For those of you who know only the Kindle, there are other e-readers, including the Barnes & Noble NOOK (which B&N assures us is not dead), and the Kobo E-Reader line. The Kobo comes in a couple of different forms; I got a Kobo Aura H2O, second edition. It’s extremely hackable and entirely open, which means that if I put my works-in-progress on it, I can use it to check for typos, and extract the database to my editor as a revision guide.
The Kobo immediately made the statement that “Elf M. Sternberg” was my favorite author; I had more books by that guy than any other, and I’ve been reading them steadily. This led me to joke that the Kobo isn’t wrong: I am my favorite author, and I comfort-read my own stuff a lot.
My own stories are part of my thinking process. They’re how I learned how to deal with the world, they’re how I reasoned about how human beings behaved. I would look or listen to something friends, acquaintances, or even media people were going through and try to reason out, “What’s going on in their minds that they got to this position?” And then I would write stories that tried to put content around that reasoning.
So when I was reading The Delicate Relationship between Grief and Fanfiction, tried hard to understand what Lynn Zubernis was saying when she said:
There are so many people I know right now who don’t try to go to bed at night until they at least read one fic, just to put themselves in a different headspace and have that burst of emotional resonance and familiarity.
… because I don’t get that at all reading other people’s stuff. Of course, I tend to have four books “in flight” at any given time: a programming book, a non-fiction book that’s not about programming, a fiction book by someone else, and my WIPs. And yet none of that really resonates the way Zubernis said it did. I read my stuff for the same reason some people like looking in a mirror, at least it’s a familiar face looking back at you. It’s someone you understand. And I’ll probably never understand other people as well as I want.
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