More signs that you’re afflicted with the condition known as WRITER:

–You are more anxious about your mailman showing up an hour late than your kids.

–The “sermon notes” section of the Sunday morning bulletin comes home every week filled in with ideas or scenes for your WIP.

–The only magazine quiz you regularly fill out is the vocabulary quiz in The Writer—and you score at least 18/20 every time and cut it out to hang on your fridge.

–Your idea of a vacation is going somewhere like Denver, Houston, Dallas, or Minneapolis to attend a writer’s conference, and you never leave the hotel.

–You have a hard time explaining what you “do.”

–You–hold on, I have to check my e-mail . . .

–You do everything you can think of to procrastinate from writing, then turn the light on in the middle of the night and furtively write a few hundred words because you feel guilty for not writing.

–You can predict the next line or conflict in just about every TV show/movie you watch.

–You don’t meet “new friends”; you meet “potential characters.”

–You stay in bed ten minutes after you wake up structuring the details of your dream into a novel synopsis, complete with character descriptions, setting, and costumes.

–You’ve ever had to replace your bathroom flooring because you decided you could get a few thoughts written down while waiting for the bathtub to fill.

–You have a cup or canister filled with pens and pencils in every room of the house—and yet you can never find a pen when you really need one. You also put the dry pens back in the cup, simply because it seems like a waste to throw away a perfectly good pen casing—one of these days, you might actually buy some refills.

–Your non-writing friends/family don’t like going to the movies with you, because you don’t walk out saying, “Yeah, that was good,” you walk out saying, “If I’d written that, I would have . . .”

–You spend more on “writing stuff” every year than you do on groceries and gas combined.

–You text-message yourself while out and about so you won’t forget a great name, a piece of dialogue, or a story idea you saw/heard while you were out.

–Conversations with friends start to include the question, “You’re not going to use that in your book, are you?”

–You think Paul Bettany’s portrayal of Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale is one of the most brilliant characters ever put on film . . . and you often quote several of his lines:

Chaucer: I’m a writer.
Wat: A what?
Chaucer: A wha–a what? A writer. I write, with parchment, and ink. Geoffrey Chaucer’s the name, writing’s the game. You’ve read my book? the Book of the Duchess? No? Well, it was allegorical.
Roland: Well, we won’t hold that against you, that’s for every man to decide for himself.
……….
Chaucer: I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every pimple, every character flaw. I was naked for a day; you will be naked for eternity.
……….
Will: You lied . . .
Chaucer: Yes . . . yes I lied. I’m a writer, I give the truth scope!

–In a group discussion/debate, you can can always see the other person’s point of view—literally. You’re composing their internal dialogue, visceral and emotional reactions while they talk.

–You’re never bored, because your characters are always there to entertain you.

Signs you might be afflicted with the condition known as WRITER:

• You would rather talk to the voices in your head than the person sitting next to you.

• You know the research librarian’s office, cell, and home phone numbers but can’t remember your own.

• Some of the letters on your keyboard are completely worn off.

• You would rather write than go out.

• Your/you’re and their/there/they’re errors send you into an apoplectic fit.

• You get cranky if you don’t get to write.

• You’ve ever said, “The voices are getting louder; I must go write.”

• When talking with others, you mentally edit their dialogue and compose tags and beats.

• You’ve heard/seen something and thought, I need to write that down.

• You’ve ever written a scene, outline, synopsis, or character sketch on a restaurant napkin . . . and it wasn’t a paper napkin.

• You wake up in the middle of the night and scrabble for the pen and paper you keep next to your bed to write down a scene to make the voices be quiet so you can get some sleep.

• You end an argument with your spouse by saying, “Oh, wait, I have to write this down–this is the perfect conflict for my characters! Now, repeat what you just yelled.”

• Getting the scene finished is more important than food, coffee, or the bathroom.

• You have a momentary reality lapse and mention your characters’ situation as a prayer request in Sunday school.

• A blank wall becomes the screen where the scene you’re writing takes place right in front of your eyes.

• The easiest way for you to deal with conflict is to go home and write it into your story.

• You have filed and cross-referenced every issue of The Writer and Writer’s Digest you’ve ever received.

• You purposely eavesdrop when out in public.

• At parties, your method of making conversation is to discover people in the room with interesting occupations (preferably your hero’s or heroine’s) so you can conduct research.

• You listen to the writer’s commentary on every DVD so that you can analyze his/her writing process.

• You have a favorite line from every movie you’ve seen.

• You can’t write because you’re mad at one of your characters.

• You argue with said character.

• You have a folder on your computer labeled “Ideas.” Some of the files within this folder have only one or two words or sentences and while they made perfect sense fifteen years ago, between the software changes in that period of time garbling half the words and your own faulty memory, you have no idea what it means or where you were going with it. But you keep it anyway because you never know, you might remember it eventually.

• You drive three hours to a city where you don’t know anyone, spend another three hours driving around the city, then drive three hours home and decide NOT to set your story there.

What are some other signs of the affliction?