January 19, 2006

I’ve come to a simple conclusion. I don’t think there’s anything in life that I can do besides write. I mean, I could do other things. I really could be a mechanic. I love what’s inside a car. It’s like a mind, only you can climb in and look around. You can tell what’s wrong with it just by looking and no one develops any silly theories or manufactures medications for it that don’t do any good.

I could be a criminologist, too. I could profile criminals. I could meet with murderers, interview them and write true crime books about them. I could do all that, but it would probably make me extremely depressed. How do people deal with that?

I could be a psychologist. I really could. Psychology amazes me. It’s like auto mechanics, only a lot deeper and with a lot more variables. I could be a prison psychologist. The criminal mind is really the most interesting part. But through all of that, when would I get time to write? What it comes down to is this–

When I’m at work, when I’m shopping, when I’m doing anything, really, the back of my mind is thinking about Words. It’s thinking about stories, about characters, people in my head. It’s not something I often consider, because it’s always there. When you think about something nonstop, you sort of . . . stop thinking about it. It becomes part of you. A constant. That’s what writing is for me. So when I think about other things, I don’t notice the little voice in the back of my head, the one that spouts out sentences of plotlines.

I can’t live without Writing. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t become anything else. When would I write?