Recently, I have begun to suspect that I have a mild form of hypergraphia, that insidious neurologic disorder that dampens a person's impulse control, causing him or her to write obsessively. It can be rated on a scale of 1 (nagging preoccupation, can't go more than a few days without writing) to 10 (Stephen King). I have to admit, if this is true, it's kind of a cool affliction to have. I always wanted some sort of debilitation or tragic moral failing to give me credibility as a writer—something like gambling or womanizing or the compulsion to collect excess fertilizer on weekends and shape it into tall, grooved mounds like Devil's Tower.

Throughout the ages, alcoholism has been the most popular choice for writers. It was embraced by such giants as James Joyce, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Truman Capote. Jack London, always the prodigy, started on the bottle when he was five, stealing sips of beer while he carried a sloshing bucket of it into the fields for his stepfather. Nothing to be ashamed of there. However, it's a little late for me to get started down that road, and I certainly don't want to be one of those Janie-come-latelys who only becomes a drinker because she's heard it's the fashionable thing to do. No, indeed. As for womanizing and gambling, I don't really have the temperament for it. Of course, there is a wide world of pharmaceuticals to be tried. Burroughs was all about the morphine and the heroin. Poe, too, was thought to have a crippling opium addiction, although it's since been revealed that this was pure mythology—he was just really, really morbid. And I suppose I could emulate Percy Bysshe Shelly, but where does one obtain laudanum these days, anyhow?

My vices are not glamorous at all. They consist primarily of somewhat disagreeable habits, such as buying too many shoes, talking to myself incessantly, and making up nasty limericks about people I don't like. None of this screams out "greatest literary voice of her generation." I guess I could adopt a weird belief system, something centered around phrenology or the notion of a Flat Earth. But then I'd likely be dismissed as "arcane" or "fringe" or "stupid like a big box of rocks." This kind of pablum won't get you the Pulitzer, unless they create a special category for writers whose strange, anachronistic theories about the world enable them to soar to great heights of mediocrity.

So hypergraphia it is. Hey, I'll take what I can get. Anyway, I'm grateful for the modicum of eccentricity that this malady affords me, and also grateful that it's not so all-consuming as to render me incapable of performing my daily tasks. (So far, my record for continuous writing is seven hours—that's a whole seventeen hours frittered away on pointless activities like sleeping, eating, and going to work). Never have I sat at the keyboard until I was little more than a slumped, delirious ghost of my former self. And just for the record, I have never honestly considered killing people just so I'd have something interesting to write about (as inevitably happens in those weird horror movies that always seem to star Judd Nelson). There are all sorts of good reasons to kill people, as any Raskolnikov can tell you, but writer's block should never be one of them.

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