You know the feeling when you finish a really spectacular book and you just can't move on? You're hanging around on the last page, musing over the last few lines, perhaps turning to the mysterious blank pages publishers include and hoping for a secret little bit more. Like when I went to the movies as a teenager and waiting around until the credits had finished rolling rewarded me with an intimate fifteen seconds of something. Good movies don't seem to do that anymore. But that's a story for another day. I've got the book-finishing-psychoses of a rabid reader and a writer working against me. I find myself wishing for more and more and more book and also wondering why it is I think I've got something in me that will make somebody else feel the same way. And what's the point of writing if i haven't? I want to turn pages more than I've ever wanted to turn heads, to facilitate cramped hours in bed ravishing sentences long after bedtime, to fan crushes and crush expectations to finest metaphorical powder.

But I finish something like Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star and I just don't feel like a contender.