Here’s your multiple guess response:

1. Drinking
2. Researching something that may or may not help with the next book
3. Considering a job in the real estate business–or, basically anything other than writing
4. Reading another author’s books as an excuse for not writing
5. Studying potential marketing plans in hopes of competing with James Patterson and Catherine Coulter (haha)
6. Spending more money on a new website that costs more than his or her books are likely to earn
7. We’re always writing even if we’re not actually writing

I guess all of the above are true. Yesterday afternnoon, my wife and I went down to Duluth, Georgia to the Southeastern Railway Museum’s celebration of its move to a new site some twenty years ago. We had fun seeing a museum we hadn’t been do in a very long time. We moved away (twice) and volunteering there was no longer possible.

Funny thing is, we wandered into the museum because I was doing research on railways for a book. We got trapped. We became volunteers. We worked our butts off for about ten years there. It’s easy to become derailed when you’re doing research.

Yes, I did write the book.

But for quite a few years, the museum was a passion because both my wife and I loved history.

As you may have heard, everything a writer experiences might end up in the next book. (I usually change the names to protect the guilty.)  If you think one of the characters in one of my books, you’re right, it might be you. But here’s the thing: everything we see when we’re not sitting at a keyboard might become part of the next story. Figuratively speaking, we’re always writing.

We see our lives as a series of stories, Sometimes I write them down and they become novels. Like most authors, I don’t make any money doing that because very few authors in the U.S. actually make any money. But, we’re addicted to writing when we aren’t drinking.

–Malcolm

My latest novel is called “Lena” and takes place in north Florida when the KKK was still a real problem.