Hi, A. E. Costello here. Welcome to my blog! I know that it seemed like I had completely abandoned it without warning, and well, I’ve returned. I’ve been ill, and had surgery two months ago. Now fully recovered, I’m back to my blog and ready to continue on it.

So with no further ado, the post today is about falling in love with reading…again.

As a kid, I used to read like if I didn’t read I’d stop breathing.

Then once I got really into writing, and decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up when I was around 10 years old, my reading and my writing went hand in hand. What I read influenced my writing, I wrote what I was reading, and by reading I learned how to write.

Yet nearly ten years ago, I stopped reading. Not entirely, but a lot. I was more reading fanfiction than novels, and I really avoided new books that were coming out. I also rarely read the books I already knew I loved. When I realized I had stopped reading, it struck me sort of dumb.

Why would I stop reading, when I’ve always loved to read so much?

But then, in a conversation with my sister that I don’t remember having, she tells me that I once told her that I purposefully decided to stop reading, so that what I read wouldn’t influence my writing.

Man oh man did that come back to bite me in the butt.

It wasn’t like my intentions were bad. I read so much and as I began to write, my stories started to repeat plotlines and characters of other books I had read. My sister pointed out what each story I wrote came from, and so, horrified, and wanting to write “original” stories, I decided I’d stop reading so I wouldn’t be influenced.

Bad idea.

After stopping reading, my ability at writing began to wane. And then in fact, I stopped writing as much as well, and when I did try to write, I struggled. It was really painful for me to have so much trouble writing, when I used to write as easily as breathing.

I remember having to teach myself how to foster creativity and how to write again back in college, as when I was taking creative writing classes I found it difficult to even write a short story.

Going through that honestly made me realize the true connection between reading and writing. Once I stopped reading, it really made writing on my original works more difficult.

To write a lot, you have to read a lot, its that simple.

I know I stopped reading in an effort to preserve my originality, but that’s not how it works. I’ll make a post on how to be original another time.

Since I graduated university in 2019, and am fully committed to making writing my full time passion and profession, my goal is to fall in love with reading again.

I want to do an “A. E. Reads” post a month, so one book a month. And right now, I’m not even in love with reading. I’ve really lost my voracious hunger to read. I used to read four books a day!

No doubt I won’t be reading four books a day any more, but right now, I try to read at least a chapter a day of my current book.

I’ll be reviewing that book in an A. E. Reads post once I’ve finished reading it. As for my upcoming A. E. Reads post will be reviewing my favorite stories from the anthology A Phoenix Must First Burn, edited by Patrice Caldwell.

As for other housekeeping issues, I’ll also do a post later this month about where I am with my Zippy Mae series that I announced last year. It is still my next project, and my most passionate project. I’ll talk about it during that post.

As for falling in love with reading, there is a writing post here where the writer suggests to read the books you like first, or re-read books you love.

For me, I’ve found that I’ve been disliking re-reading the books I used to love growing up, which was mainly romances. So I’m reading books written by black authors with black main characters for a black audience, which is what I want to do with my written works.

So I’ll see you guys in my next post, and with my A. E. Reads, I’ll foster that love of reading. I’ll also be writing Zippy Mae, and I’ll update you about that soon.

And as always, while I write my cat Aomine keeps me company by my side.