214041 are you ready? this is a little confusing to explain, but pretty clear in my... whattayacallit... mind. as far as I'm concerned, right now, there is not a "thing" called Literature. I mean, it exists as a function of other... activities. Love, soccer, hormones, machines hard at work, clouds, steam, brass, iron, the smell of the sky, outbursts of anger, a dream of love.... All these things manifest lines of force that intersect in patterns, and the "thing" we call "writing" is an encoding/decoding of these patterns. Why Raymond said a writer should do something else. Cuz if you don't do something else, the "thing" you love the most, the "thing" that really fuzzes up your insides and makes everything else make anything at all approaching some kind of "sense"--doesn't--can't--exist. (2014)