f there is one thing that peeves me, it’s when I misspell something (as I just did for mispell) and someone tosses that comment my way; “I thought you were a writer.”

It happened the other day. Was at a party and some of the younger goers wanted to play a tile-based game where you kinda play scrabble against each other in a dead-heat rush. So out of three games, I didn’t win at all (though on the second, I was a contender). But at the end of the third game, two of the more-successful players actually took my tiles and showed how, rearranging them, I had a perfectly good hand.

Then someone’s mouth dropped open.

Air was sucked in.

Here it comes.

“I thought you were a writer.”

Look, being a writer and not being able to spell or pick words out of a jumble of tiles is the same thing as berating a potter because she can’t carry a fifty-pound sack of clay to her workshop. Such things have nothing at all with being a writer.

Writing is the ability to create a world and the situations within, to craft a perfect passage with the right balance of description, mood, cadence and polish to make your reader cry or soar or laugh aloud. It has nothing to do with spelling, and certainly nothing to do with an “I” and a “Q” tile forming “QI” (is that even a word?).

And if you don’t know these things, all I can ask is, “You call yourself a reader?”

>>>SEE MY WRITING FOR YOURSELF, DOWN THIS LINK!<<<