Wonderlust.

 My happy place is when you encounter a random author for the first time at your local Writer's Festival a few months ago, and you really like the way they speak about their work, so you buy their YA novel at the bookstore after the session and you read it and you love it, because it reminds you what reading Australian YA is all about.

And then you move on to reading other novels, novels about studying English Lit at university, even, and while you happen to be reading these other novels you polish off the rest of yesterday's bottle of red wine and then you sit down at your writing desk and you're meant to be diligently scribing something to do with your list of #100 writing prompts to re-build your writing muscles, like doing reps at the gym, but instead, you flip back in the notebook which you had taken with you to the Writer's Festival, and you find your notes from the session where you first encountered the YA author, and you realise that the first thing you scribbled down after the author's name was the fact that they wrote a PhD on the subject of wonder. And you remember how you thought to yourself at the time that gosh dang it you are a librarian from a university and tracking down a thesis should be the easiest thing in the world.

Within two google searches and no more than 25 seconds I had downloaded:

Betts, A. (2018). Rogue: A Novel - and - Wonderlust: the value of wonder for readers, writers, and The Vault: A critical essay. Edith Cowan University. Retrieved from https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2122

Upon opening the PDF file I looked breathlessly at the page count: 92.

Oh, I wiggled so happily in my seat. It's like sitting down to a 9-course banquet.

When I was at university I used to read stuff like this for breakfast. Recently I have missed eating nourishing brain food. I used to look at the titles of books in the library and absolutely revel in the most esoteric of literary analyses; the stranger the better, like an indulgent and particularly wordy Dionysus.

Wonderlust. The lust for wonder. I'm down bad with it and I never want to recover.