One of the responses I get when people learn I write full time for a living, is, “Oh that must be an exciting life.”

I’m never sure how to answer this, because I believe one’s level of excitement is relative to their experience in life, and I think many people equate the life of a writer with that of the rich and famous, which is untrue. At least it’s untrue of my life, at this point.

As some examples of what I find exciting as compared to my experiences as a writer, I’ll start with the first thing I remember as being really exciting in my life. When I was an eleven-years-old teen my father was an executive with Ford Motor Company, and we were transferred to Mexico City, Mexico. Mexico was a country in where they disliked blue-eyed, blond-haired foreigners interfering in their business. It was a country, in which the kidnapping of foreigners was a national past-time during the 1970s, and Ford refused to pay ransoms. So, cowering and huddled in the in the protection of the stairwell with the rest of the family while some lunatic shot out all our house windows was infinitely more exciting than waiting six-to-eight weeks for an uninterested agent to respond to a query letter with a hand-written rejection. Even having my first book published doesn’t compare to the heart-pounding excitement of being kidnapped by a drunk Mexican cop and being held at gunpoint while a friend rushes back to his home to get enough money to bribe the cop. Nor have I experienced anything in my writing career that compares to the rush of running out into University of Michigan stadium (the big house), in front of 105.00 hostile fans, before the football game that will decide the Big-Ten championship.

If you change the word “exciting” with “interesting”, then I would agree. I find my life as a writer interesting. There is nothing more intriguing to me than fitting together all the pieces of a new plot. It is the reason I write. Writing is a challenge, an addiction.