If you have somehow stumbled upon my website and are now reading this blog post, congratulations you are awesome and may I say you have great taste in reading material. When it comes to collecting books, I do believe that there is a wrong and a right way to go about it. I have been collecting books since I was a kid but I did not hit my stride until a few years ago. Back in the day, I feel really old just saying that, I would beg my parents to buy me a book. Sometimes I would find them at a bookstore on base, other times through the book fair at school. Book fairs, ahh what a wonderful time.
I would buy them because I wanted to read them, an odd thought process I know, but it worked for me back then. I would buy the book, read the book, put said book on a shelf and start the process all over again. 
I even went back and reread a few of them when my parents weren't in the buying Nic new books mood. When I became a teenager, especially in my later teen years, I finally put all my books on one six foot tall shelf and I liked the way it looked. Seeing them all together really made me realise that I wanted to display my books like trophies, worlds that I had conquered. 
Over the next few years I eagerly read through everything I could get my hands on. I read fantasy and science fiction with a little YA sprinkled in there. I read as fast as I could and as soon as the books were closed, no matter what time it was, I had to add them to the shelf. Soon the shelf became overcrowded and a second shelf had to be purchased, then any surface in my room that could hold a book did so. 
This continued until I bought my first house and began construction on my office/library. It was at this point though that I discovered I had a problem. This is where the wrong way comes in to play. Buying books that I wanted to read, and reading them, was fine. I was able to exercise my mind and not completely destroy my wallet. It was about this time though that I discovered the wonders of online shopping. This was a very bad thing for me.
I began to order books that I wanted to read and had been looking for for years. I ordered hard copies of books that I had in paperback. I ordered books that were missing from collections. I ordered books that were by an author that I liked and had not read yet. All of this is well and dandy, except I did all of that and more in a very short time. All the while still buying books off Facebook, and in person at bookstores. My house looked like the Dursley house in Harry Potter when all the letters were being delivered. I was Harry, my wife was everyone else. 
I not only spent a lot of money extremely fast, I was also buying books faster than I could read them. Soon my TBR pile was over a hundred books and I was still online, clicking BID or Buy on the next find. 
​I will cover more about this and conclude this story in my next blog post. BYE! 

I am a retail worker by day, master procrastinator and writer by night, and I stumbled upon something very interesting this week. I have been working for a large box retailer for many years now I remember way back in the day when the last few Twilight books and movies released.
Back then, we would move entire aisles around and set up que lines for fans to wait in. We made limits for how many copies people could buy and it was a huge ordeal. We sold out of everything we had each time one of the books or movies came out.
Back then I was a young writer with the hopes of finishing a book and praying that one or two people might actually want to read it. The thought of making it to that level was no even a dream back then.
What happened after the movies though was the world moved on. The young teens, and some adults, who fell in love with the shinny vampires and suspiciously hair free werewolves grew up and moved on to other things.
This is how the world works for most fads. They rise, they fall, they rise for something else.
What makes Twilight so interesting to me though is that this week, Stephanie Meyer released another book in the saga. This one I believe is a redo of her first book but from the vampire’s point of view.
I am not sure if my literature circle has shifted so much over the years that I just missed this but it seems to me that it flew under the radar. I happened to walk by the book aisle at my store, like I do every day, and see if anything new came out and there she was.
A new Twilight book, and entire stack of them to be honest. Mixed in with all the other new releases. No banner like before, no que lines. Not even a display shelf for the book. There were books by first time authors that have more promotional material for them then this thing has.
I have not seen any commercials or advertisements for the book on any of my feeds. The other people in my book circles aren’t even talking about it. This series got so big that it changed how publishers handle new authors. It became a craze that took the world by storm and almost everyone has heard of the series.
It gained this massive following and now, several years later, there is a new book on the shelf and no one seems to care, or at least not like they did back then. I am sure there are still some fans of the series that went out and bought it but not like before.
Times are changing, books are still celebrated but not like they were before. It is interesting to watch people walk past the shelves filled with stories and not even glance at them. I know Twilight was not the greatest series ever written, I know that. It has to be said though that a ton of people bought her books and read them so it had to be good to a certain point. Now a new book comes out and it did not even make a ripple in the writing world.
Something to think about.