The Lottery

My significant other asked me what I would do if I won the lottery (nearly impossible to begin with, doubly so since I don't play but maybe once a year). My list is really rather short: send my parents on a cruise to Europe on the QEII, buy them a new house and let them sell the old and keep the cash, buy my middle sister a house and same story, set up trusts for my kids and all my nieces and nephews, donate a bunch to charities of my choice, and buy some land and a few horses, but pretty much my same lifestyle. Return to university for a PhD in comparative religion.

"But would you keep writing?"

"Nah. I'd never write another word."

Of course, I was asked this during deadline hell week. To which, he said, "You're full of it. YOU, not write? Not write a word?"

And then I 'fessed up. Of course I'd keep writing nearly as much as I do now, only with longer periods of laziness and procrastination. I don't write because it's my job, but because it's who I am. I'm a writer.

From the first time I wrote a short story in second grade, through, I remember, Ms. Nussbaum (the first teacher I ever knew who used Ms., which I thought was fabulous), my English teacher, selecting one of my seventh-grade stories for the school literary magazine, on through college, and then beyond, I wrote because putting the stories I have in my head down on paper seemed to be the only way to shut my brain up. I write because I am.