My Life in Libraries

I have a post up today at MaineCrimeWriters.com in honor of National Library Week. The library was the place where I decided to cross the line from reading books to writing them my myself. Being surrounded by all those wonderful stories opened up my imagination in surprising ways (sometimes exhilerating, sometimes disturbing). I know we're all supposed to be excited by the infinite possibilities of the internet, but there's a lot to be said for having limited choices at hand—being forced, in my case, to read Catch-22 because I'd run through all the other paperbacks on the free shelf and then discovering it spoke to me in ways I never would have imagined. Today, libraries are going through a period of deep soul-searching, as they increasingly become places where patrons come to browse the web and not the books. That's fodder for another post. But I would be remiss, given my success as an author, not to pay homage to the libraries that helped form my sensibility.