Confessions of a Bookaholic by D.B. Dean
The girl next door's blog
Hello, My Name is Davida and I am a bookaholic. My addiction started as a young child. My earliest memories are of my mother and father reading to me. They exposed me to Agatha Christie and Louis L’Amour before I was old enough to hold the book myself. My hungry young mind inhaled the second-hand words hungrily.
I remember my first book so clearly. I carefully opened the light green cover of “The Secret Garden”. The smell of fresh paper and book binding glue hit my nose and I felt the rush. I would read and re-read that book until the pages were worn out. It was the gateway to a whole other world.
We didn’t have a TV in our home, and so we would sit in the living room and read the complete works of Shakespeare. As a teenager I became a social outcast. Normal kids could not quote whole Shakespearean Sonnets from memory. Normal teenage girls were not familiar with Kipling and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. The addiction had already begun to take its toll, separating me from my peers.
The addiction grew worse over time. I function in society as best I can. But there are times when the hunger for words is to strong for me to resist. I have defied authority and broken the law to get my fix. As a child I would disobey my parents at bed time, reading underneath the covers with a flash light. As an adult, many a traffic law has been broken as I read at stoplights and prop up my book on the steering wheel if the freeway slows to a crawl. I hide in the bathroom away from my children, jonesing for just one more page.
In my thirties the hunger grew so much that I was not happy just reading other writers words. I began to write my own stories in the hope that I could sell them to others to support my habit. I couldn’t wait for my favorite authors create stories, I had to make my own. Stories began to form in my mind, and even though I begged and pleaded, I could not find others to write them. They kept insisting I should write them myself. Tom Schreck: Writer, Teacher, Boxer was the coldest of all. He kept pushing me to write, insisting I had the talent. My husband, probably wanting me to stop buying other people’s work, had always encouraged me to write. But I think that was just to save money and free up space along our living room wall.
And so I began to cook up adventures. Hours spent crafting the perfect mix of character, action and conflict. I spend every waking moment reviewing the plots in my mind, obsessing over the smallest detail. And then I wait on the corner, hoping someone will come along and buy my work, always scared that the powers that be will consider it unworthy for public consumption. I write, I read and hunger for more. The end of a book is like coming down off a binge. I am depressed that the story is over, longing for another. Some of my favorite authors only put out a new book in their series once a year. I pre-order the book, waiting on pins and needles for it to arrive. Like a kid at christmas I rip into the packing material and devour the book in a night. Then I hit bottom, realizing that another book wont be along for a whole year.
I fear this sort of addiction has no cure. I am to far gone my friends.
I am a bookaholic, a peddler of words, an addict.
