Thank you, Stephen King.

I stopped reading you when I was 17. There was a reason for this: I’d run through everything you’d ever written by that time and I was burnt out on you, so I went on to glomming my next author, whom I have also never read again. Lather, rinse, repeat throughout my life. Glom, abandon, glom, abandon. Yes, I am an evil reader.

I’m caught in a perpetual spin cycle concerning how I can classify what I wrote, which I can’t. Still can’t. Lately, I’ve just kind of been looking at publishing as a business (‘cuz I got one of those press thingies now) and getting a wee bit discouraged when it’s finally drilled into my head that classifications aren’t just nice to have or helpful, they’re necessary. “We don’t know where to put it” isn’t just a statement of fact, it’s a deep, deep statement on business in general. In fact, after yesterday’s post springboarding off of Kara Lennox‘s Romancing the Blog post, I realized that my writing is so niche it may have an audience in the double digits if I’m lucky. That’s my variable; some thing (don’t know what) in all my writing has taken it out of an otherwise orderly classification.

Today I had reason to be directed to the acceptance speech Stephen King made in 2003 for an award from the National Book Foundation. He said: “I never in my life wrote a single word for money.”

Two things struck me: 1) I could be a lot more supportive of my husband and 2) it’s okay that I’m not doing this for the money.

Dude, I am so going to start reading you again. It’s been a while.

UPDATE: Just after I posted this, I found a thread on A Motley Vision concerning Seth Godin’s passion/pop curve, which pretty much let me know I’m not alone in this endeavor.