Since I have realized I am only dreaming, my relief has been immeasurable.

Not that my dream is all bad. I am dreaming that I recently moved to a place called Pompano Beach. I am living in an apartment with a balcony overlooking a lake, a place where I like to write.

I must have been having this dream since the last day of December. It cannot be real because this place I love is overshadowed by a dystopia, an alternate America presided over by a xenophobic demagogue whose rallying cry is Bring Back Torture.

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I.

I have made friends with darkness. There is a warmth in it, the dusky comfort of a plush teddy bear or the soothing delight of just-baked brownies.

I discovered the warmth of darkness two years ago when, at age 25, I lost my vision to a degenerative disease.

At first the darkness scared me. I opened my eyes wide as the color drained slowly from my life. It was like death was coming early, encasing my brain in a deeply buried coffin, isolating my mind as the world around it faded away.

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As a fiction writer, I often wonder what kind of character I am. Am I a sympathetic character, or are there scenarios in which I could be a villain? Most people, I suspect, could be either in extreme situations. But my introspection regarding stories goes beyond good and evil. I wonder if I am a passive character or an active character.

I know which I would rather be. It seems like a choice between being interesting and being boring. Of course, the reality is that in some situations I am passive, and in others active. No real person is entirely one or the other, just as no one is totally a villain or a hero.

However, for stories I always prefer active main characters. But what exactly does being active mean? Does it mean characters should charge at each other across fields brandishing swords? Dash into burning houses to save children?

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Months ago I received a letter from my sanity imploring me to go off Twitter. It was delivered first class, so it must have been an emergency.

However, I wanted to stay on Twitter, so I just filed the letter away. In recent days, however, my sanity began blasting me with emails ordering me to go off Twitter, or else it would pack its suitcase and move to Australia. I have bipolar disorder. When my sanity delivers ultimatums, I listen.

I complied by vacating my Twitter account, walking away from over 50,000 followers. i have not checked my notifications since December 16. I emailed my sanity to ask if Google Plus and Facebook were okay. My sanity wrote back and told me to go stare at a lake or a tree.

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I am moving to Pompano Beach this month. Good thing I do not have a “real” job to quit.

The awesome thing about being a novelist is we are infinitely portable. Fling us across the globe and we will write just the same, continuing to spin words into imaginary worlds as if nothing has changed.

Ship me off to a planet on another solar system, and I will happily write by the light of another star. I sometimes feel like I travel through life inside a word bubble, or an imaginary space ship, that goes wherever I go.

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For too much of my life I had the impression that writing was something that happened to you because the gods of inspiration had chosen you, not something that you did.

The result was helpless frustration. I sought ways to make my elusive moments of inspiration visit me more often. I wanted to know how to trick, entrap, and seduce them into being my servants, not coy and elusive ghosts.

The culture of writing fueled my obsession with mystical phenomena like talent and inspiration, but there was too little mention of a greater power which is entirely controllable: process.

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No writer wants to hear that his story is “predictable.” It one of the worst criticisms you can give a writer. It suggests tedium and dullness.  At the same time writers are told that characters should be consistent, that they should never lurch from the rules that govern their personalities – in other words, characters should be somewhat predictable; otherwise, their life-like illusion breaks down.

A simple example is Cookie Monster. Cookie Monster is about as predictable as a character can get. He loves cookies, he always loves cookies, and the farther Cookie Monster is willing to go in pursuit of cookies, the more lovable he is. No one wants to see Cookie Monster drop cookies for cauliflower – unless in the end he realizes the error of his ways and comes home to his true nature: Cookie! Om, nom, nom, nom!

Cookie Monster is predictable in motive, but he is not dull. He is endlessly creative when it comes to finding new and unpredictable ways to appreciate cookies.

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Writing is the next best thing to telepathy. It makes up for something we lack in nature: the ability to truly feel what it is like to be another person.

Sympathy aside, everything I experience, I ultimately experience alone. This will always be true. No one else will ever literally feel my pain, my bliss, my disappointments, or my triumphs, just as I will never know exactly what it feels like to be someone else. But by reading, maybe I can come close.

When reading, I draw on personal frames of reference to understand other viewpoints. All is Quiet on the Western Front gave me a horrifying sense of what it felt like to be a German soldier during World War I. The Slave Narrative of Frederick Douglas triggered in me personal feelings of injustice as the author showed me what it was like to be an American slave before the Civil War.

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Sometimes I have the thought, “I have lost my way.” It always alarms me. It suggests that at some point in my life I must have had a WAY so perfect that if I had only continued to follow it without straying, it would have led to eternal bliss, infinite wisdom, or enlightenment.

At times I may have the thought when it is not really called for, when I am only having a bad day. But there have been times in my life when I really did lose my way, times when I moved away from who I really was and toward some alien substitute which left me desperately unfulfilled and confused.

The first time I lost my way, I was a chronically confused nine-year-old who had been repeatedly teased for being shy.

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My short story “The Age of Erring” would not behave.

I had ordered it to be a short story, but it tried to become a novel. I wrote at least 50 pages with no end in sight until I realized that the story was mushrooming out of my control. To contain the explosion, I reduced it to about ten pages. In the end I was happy with it, but it took me so long to write that it delayed publication of my new story collection by almost two months.

The collection, which I released last week, is The Age of Erring and Other Tales.

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