I picked up Joy in the Morning two weeks ago and fell in love with it. It was so enchanting, and (I felt) so well-written without being pretentious or complex. I wonder about the current widespread attachment to the Twilight series. Teenagers and most astoundingly, middle-aged women are in a frenzy over what is the worst writing I've come across in a long time. But what is bad writing anyway? It doesn't correlate with the number of times you have readers reaching for the dictionary. Betty Smith (and many great authors before and after her) wrote novels, considered today to be classics. It also doesn't have to do with the content of that which you are writing. There's a way to write fantasy and adventure simply and well.

Another note on writing. I've noticed that my sentence structures are slowly growing more and more awkward as I get older. It's painful reading some of my high school journal entries because they're better than anything I've written recently. It returns to how hard I feel it is to marry my thoughts and words. Do I not know the words to express my thoughts or maybe the way in which to construct my sentences effectively?