Punky PJ's brand new What I'd Steal From Whom series

I've frittered away a major part of my waking time, coffee-paid-rumination time, unlawfully-misused-job-time, precious-staring-into-space time wondering if I'll ever become a writer. I've let this angsty question mark gnaw away at that 2 percentile working area of my brain, wallow in the surplus bile my life can produce in alarmingly huge quantities without notice, jump up and down and dance around them heart valves as I interview a good author, read a fantastic book, watch a superlative movie, or chip away at a blogpost that seems like something worth reading after all.


Thing is, I'm sick of wondering whether I'm an original. I mean, how many times can you read a heartbreakingly lifefuckingly awesome line/ passage in a book and go, 'shit, everything's already been said. (And so well.)' How many times can I shut a book and hug it to my chest because it has expanded and broken my heart all at the same time; because it's cast my life in beautiful ever-blooming words while at the same time, showing me how banal my own words for it are? How many times can I angst over a semi-colon, and not think 'you'd better justify this OCD by becoming a writer, bitch'. And how long can I stick by my tough, lonely, waiting-for-Godot decision to wait for a story to find me?


Thing is, I don't know if I can ever not do everything I did in the last para. I don't know if I can quit waiting, and I don't know if I can go on. But I can make purgatory a tad more interesting. I can bide my time by doing some 'prep', as they call it in MBA land (and Malory Towers). I can do a thorough survey of all the books I am reading and loving every bit of, and put my finger on every goddamn heartbreaking thing in it that's making me dizzy and sick with sweet-sad love for the world. That way, I can a) find a cure for my nasty talent for not remembering all the worthwhile things (and remembering all kinds of trivialities, such as page number of gorgeous line in book, rather than line itself), and b) have a good archive of readymade solutions, a problem-solving oracle of sorts, for the time when I do start writing the Story that finds me, and find that it is joined at the hip to my old enemy called Writer's Block.


So from next post, Punky PJs lists her top n list of What She'd Steal from Whom. Which means a post talking about each of the books she's either in the afterglow of (just finished reading), or can forever ruminate on the afterglow of (like Sacred Games, ohdon'tgetmestarted), or is beginning to foresee afterglow of (TBA). So that c) you can get her rant and your bookstore-browsing reco needs fufilled, all at once.


Beginning with Omar Ahmad's The Storyteller's Tale, a gorgeous novella that was read in airport surroundings and hence will always have a mysterious in-betweenness-of-worlds recall...