I read a lot. Well, by some standards maybe I should read even faster, but I also write full time, so I read a book a week. That's about 50 books a year, and my body being close to 40, probably another 2,000 books in the rest of my life. Although, who knows, maybe by then people will live all the way to being 200 years old (doubt it). It takes 10,000 hours to get good at something, or so Malcolm Gladwell says. That's 5 years of doing something for about 8 hours a day. I started writing full time in May 2012, so this spring it will be 2 years. In this time I have read 80 books. Of course, I've read books before this, but I didn't read them as a writer. I also wrote 4 books so far (if you want to count the little book of tweets, that's 5) which technically are 2. My first trilogy wasn't meant to be a trilogy, so let's count it as 1. This means I'm on my 3rd book now. I did this math to illustrate to you how fast (or slow) we learn. I read good stuff, really good stuff. Just look at my reading list. I'm trying to catch up on classics because I read them in English for the first time, as if I were a teenager (I'm about 16 years old by that count, having moved to US from Russia 16 years ago). Still. You would think by now I would've learned how to write the perfect description. I thought I totally got it. I felt it. It was flowing out of my ferocious heart laden with emotion. Feel, I told everyone, feel and write down what you feel.

RIGHT. WRONG.