I’ve been thinking about my last post and about books and reading and how it affects my life. Or can or has or whatever. I remember two years ago, when Harry Potter 7 came out. It was the end of an era, and also the summer I graduated from college (after a measly million seven years there). There was no way I wasn’t going to read HP7 as soon as it came out–I’d learned my lesson about being slow with HP and hearing spoilers–but I was also really relating to Harry, Ron, and Hermione, venturing out on their own. I’d graduated. I’d lost my Dumbledore, though not through death, and my Hogwarts, and I didn’t really know where to go from there. Maybe that’s why I liked all the camping scenes my friends got bored with, because I felt just as lost. I’d never not been in school, never not had some place to go or thing to do. With my spouse still in school, and with me not even trying to get a job in my field, we weren’t leaving town. I was looking for a job to survive, but I knew what I really wanted to do, and what I’d hoped to be able to do by the time I left college, was write for a living. That obviously hadn’t happened. I was good, I had 7 novels under my belt, and the last one had even been good, but I wasn’t making any money at it.

So I read HP7 not just for the story, but also searching for some kind of guidance. I felt like Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and I were kind of in the same boat. Kind of. They were trying to stop Voldemort, though they didn’t necessarily know how. They were without their mentor and their institution, all alone, trying to figure things out. And so was I. I don’t remember what my conclusion was about myself in comparison to the HP kids by the end of the book, but I do remember it helped just relating so much to everything. And I also remember writing Renegade X at the same time as reading HP7. I don’t remember which one I started first, but they were pretty close together. It was probably a coincidence, and it’s not like I’ve never felt lost again between then and now–it took me a long time to find a publisher for Renegade X, so there were plenty of opportunities to agonize over whether or not I’d made mistakes, failed completely, and gone absolutely nowhere. But reading the book when I did certainly meant a lot to me, and I believe it made a difference in my life and how I dealt with things. Sometimes the only one who really understands what you’re going through in the book you’re reading.