An author's life is solitary. Sometimes, days will go by and I won't leave my apartment or look outside. My spouse will come and go. We'll fall asleep at different times and wake at different times.
This is important because I am an incredibly confident, outgoing, social person. Like all of my fellow extraverts, I thrive on human contact. This means that from 20,000 feet, writing fiction is a really bad fit for me.
So, the question is: is this right for me? I wonder, sometimes.
Since moving away from my hometown, most of my personal contact now is totally electronic, sometimes totally text-only. I recently caught up with an old friend from my university using Instant Messaging, and she said:
"There was a page I read the other day, and thought 'hmm, wonder how far [dreamdecree's] gotten with the book' http://m-stiefvater.livejournal.com/98551.html"
I've never heard of that author and I've never read her books, but her description of writing them resonated with me. I recognized the writer highs and writer lows she talked about, empathized with the second-guessing and self-deprecating, and above all felt elated that it was all normal.
It's not any proof that working on these books is what I should do, but it's something.
