Imagination is another huge part of it. I like that quote from Garrison Keillor– one of the greatest story-tellers I’ve ever heard. I don’t much like Prairie Home Companion (it’s a bit too folksy for me) but Garrison Keillor is an incredible orator and writer.

Second, I LOVE the “writers profile” of yourself that you did there. It’s so important to know ourselves as writers, I think that this idea of self-awareness often gets lost in everything else when we actually sit down to write. Knowing our strengths, weaknesses, and plain old quirks is essential to writing something that other people want to read, because it’s the only thing that allows us to step out of ourselves and look critically at something that we’ve written.

But I do love putting words together and trying to make something that’s funny and makes sense, usually at my own expense.

And the essential question, that I cannot truly answer: why do you write?

Because I can’t paint.

One day, after having never written anything longer than a short story, I sat down at my keyboard. Eighteen months later I’d completed (they’re never really finished) a 173,000 word Victorian romance. Some of the writing, especially in the first third, is pretty clunky, but I was inspired by what I was told: write something, because you can’t go back and edit and improve a blank page. This novel remains an active work in progress.

So then I wrote a 78,000 word steampunk romance in the next four months, and spent two more months editing/revising it. Then I started a medieval (62,000 words in the last two and a half months with maybe 10,000 more to go). I have plot outlines and character work-ups for an off-beat contemporary.

Somebody help me! : )