An open (but unsent) letter, to all those “serious” people (writers and otherwise) who have belittled my work:

I am a writer, I suppose, with all that entails. I may be a novelist, an author, a poet, a madman, and a lover of words. I am a fantast, and that is enough. You may believe your works to be important, or illuminating. You may believe my works shallow and pandering. You have, at times, said as much. I may produce reams of written words, but more importantly – most important of all – I tell stories. We owe it to ourselves, and to one another, to tell stories. On the bus, about the bus, in the crush of a midsummer night's traffic accident, we will tell stories.

Your desires and dreams, purposes and mighty plans, they shine like a bright metal ball against a jeweler's velvet. Mine, in comparison, are not much more than a rustic's scenery – a festive (and you would urge, soon discarded) pine cone on a holiday tree. But if ever you must swallow your shining ball, it would perhaps settle, cold and hard and heavy, into your stomach. I think I will bury mine even in the cold land, like a weathered and storied Nord, and hang my universe from its singing branches.