Double-Stacked Bookshelves

Oh man.  How many times have I lost myself in an alternate reality via a good book?  Countless...honestly!  Nothing can beat being so immersed in a book and envisioning that atmosphere so completely that you feel as if you're an integral part of it.  For that reason alone this week's Why I Love deals with Book Worlds .  I've tried to branch out in my Why I Love responses so that they aren't redundant AND to show that I read a lot of different things.  However, absolutely nothing, I mean NOTHING, can top the world that JK Rowling created in the Harry Potter series.  For that reason alone my favorite book world is, hands down, without a doubt, Hogwarts and everything that goes with it! I've imagined walking down those very halls and experiencing everything that comes with being a student at Hogwarts.  From the moving staircases, the variety of professors, the forbidden floors, the ghosts, and so much more.  Being able to conjure up such an a...

"Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out."  ~John Gardner I've always said that I want to write a novel...a good one (hopefully).  Really, I'd like to have a career writing novels, drinking good coffee, and traveling, but I just can't seem to bring myself to sit down and write it.  I've got ideas; loads of them.  Yet, somehow every time I sit down to write nothing comes out.  Just blah and a blank page...mostly.  It's really a disease that I've had for as long as I can remember.  Well, I take that back.  When I was in elementary and early middle school I would write short horror stories.  This was due to the fact that, at the time, I was OBSESSED with R.L. Stine books.  Not the Goosebumps series, but the Fear Street ones.  The ones meant for an older audience :)  Obviously that's not the vein I want to go in now.  I'd li...