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a strange pity in her eyes, as if she was suddenly regarding a creature who had not quite grasped how the world worked. Her expression told me, politely, that writing was a waste of time; that I should grow up and take some responsibility; that I should stop being so spoilt and unrealistic, and other such things we say about people who have the courage or insanity to do the things we daren't. That I should just get a "real job". Whatever that is.

I certainly don't know what a "real job" is, from my experience in what others call them. It is really the meaning of life to struggle until you find a job that you hate the least? Maybe I am spoilt, maybe I haven't grown up, because I am incapable of understanding why I must spend the best years of my life staring wistfully out of the air-conditioned office window at a setting sun, trapped behind cool indifferent glass when I could be doing something out there that involved basking in its glow. That, for me, is time wasted. Repressing whatever ambitions you have for the veneer of polyester respectability is, for me, truly not taking responsibility. It's all down to what you want to do with your life and how successful you are in getting to do it, not what you happen to be doing to earn money at the moment. Money. Money's just something to chase when you don't know what else to follow.

"So what do you do?" It would be easier to say "I'm unemployed". On several occasions I have said just that, just to provoke a more meaningful conversation than the polite British checklist of what it is you do, how long you've been doing it for, and then smiling through a bland comment about your particular trade that serves no other purpose than to politely prove the other person has listened to what you've said. But I don't.

I say I'm a writer, because that's what I am. I'm not on the dole, I don't chase rainbows and I'm not expecting to write the next bestseller on a school for wizards, but nor do I want to. I'm just doing what I want to do, in my own time and and seeing where it takes me. It's not about not growing up, more about taking the second to the right, and going straight on till morning.

I don't know how anyone can ever say that's a waste of time.

Learn more about this author, Ben Leto.
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