I’m in and out of trying to write an essay about my own identity, resolving issues with my mom’s medical insanity, and just trying to keep my head above water.

In short: it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.

I was thinking about the amount of joy the paperback novel has brought me. It’s an entry-level format (and at one time, especially accessible to folks below certain tax brackets) that did me so much good and while I totally understand the writer’s desire to have a hardcover release (not about to sneeze at that for my own work, I mean, come on), I find myself owning very few hardcovers as an adult.

I still love this format – THIS is what a book feels like to me. The weird charm of how they age over time and how they fray and the binding falls apart when you’ve loved the book so much. The way so many were produced that sometimes it felt like discovering a new author was sort of your own secret. These were the books on the shelves that weren’t out in the open – I legit thought nobody else knew about Clive Barker when I was a kid. That fostered such a wonderful sense of ownership.

This is all scattered, but I guess my point is that paperback, at least to me, feels magical. It feels portable. It feels right. It fits genre writing like a glove and it’s affordable enough for folks to buy on a whim and discover writing they never knew they loved.