This post was originally published with book lovin mama’s. Read it here:

There are so many books I wish I’d written. I wish I’d written just about every book by L.J Smith, and Kelley Armstrong. L.J Smith was my favorite author when I was in middle school, and Kelley Armstrong is my favorite writer as an adult. They have such similar universes that I had this whole conspiracy theory that Kelley Armstrong was L.J Smith, because L.J Smith kind of disappeared for awhile. But then she came back out of the woodwork, and most of her series became television shows, so I guess they’re separate people.

I wish I’d written the Uglies Series by Scott Westerfeld. It’s so good. He does action so well. I wish I’d written Tamsin by Peter Beagle. It’s beautiful prose, and great character development. I wish I’d written the Night Circus because the plot was so well interwoven. I wish I’d written Harry Potter because it would be awesome to be rich…

I pretty much wish I’d written every good book I’ve ever read. And in a way I have. Writers read. And when you read something it becomes a part of you. My brain works the way it does because I spent my entire childhood curled up with a book. I had a real issue with telling fact from fiction… In that I made up a whole lot of fiction and tried to pass it off as fact. I think in plots and characters and dialogue. I’m not a “natural” at writing, like my creative writing teacher said. I became one through reading.

I don’t plagiarize or anything, but everything I read teaches me more about writing. My friends from book club complain that I ruin good books by picking apart their plots and character arcs. I’m pretty proud of that because that’s a learned skill from a lifetime of reading and a degrees worth of classes in literature and writing classes.

So I wish I’d written everything. And maybe, just maybe, one day someone else will wish they wrote one of my stories.You never know, it could happen.