“Hello.  My name is Kelly and I’m a writing addict.”

   That’s how all critique groups should open their meetings. Because writing is an addiction.

   Oh, I know, there are millions of people writing who are not addicted. And a few, a fraction so small only mathematicians comprehend it, have even been published. But all other writers, published, and especially those who continue writing year after year without acknowledgment, are addicts. We can’t help ourselves.

   It started with that first free taste of The Word. A bedtime story read when I was five. A library book that carried me to a world infinitely more interesting than the one I was living in. A novel where I met people closer to me than my family.

   Without realizing what was happening, I started making mental notes on how to make the books I was reading better. Imagining how I would change the plot. Finding myself writing in a journal. Jotting down story ideas in the margins during class. And then, one day, it happened, I encountered A Dealer. (Cue the old Steppenwolf song).

   They seemed harmless enough. A teacher who compliments my work. A friend who said how interesting/funny/moving my ideas were. An article about an author living in a beach house, spending her afternoons surfing. That’s when I heard it, the hiss of The Serpent. “You could live that life too.”

   So, I started thinking about writing seriously. Bought a book on writing. Subscribed to a writing magazine. And that’s where I saw it. An add for a writing workshop, the opium den of writing.

 

   Writer’s Workshops, Home of the Cartels.