“Well, it was all an accident, is what it was. I wasn’t trying to be published; I wasn’t even going to show it to anyone. I just wanted to write a book—any kind of book.
Not actually any kind of book. Fiction. See, I’m a storyteller. I can’t take any particular credit for this—I was born that way. When my sister and I were very young and shared a bedroom, we stayed up far into the night, nearly every night, telling enormous, convoluted, continuing stories, with casts of thousands (like I said, I was born with this).
Still, even though I knew I was a storyteller from an early age, I didn’t know quite what to do about it. Writing fiction is not a clearly marked career path, after all. It’s not like law, where you do go to school for X years, pass an exam, and bing! you can charge people two hundred dollars an hour to listen to your expert opinions (my sister’s a lawyer). Writers mostly make it up as they go along, and there is no guarantee that if you do certain things, you will get published. Still less is there any guarantee that you’ll make a living at it.”
