I’m what you might call a compulsive writer. Or convulsive. Or something.
I write because I have to. I’ve quit now and then, but I come back to it. Sometimes I just end up abandoning it because life gets in the way, but sooner or later I come back to it.
It’s not necessarily even fiction. I just like writing. Movie reviews, quirky little essays, ruminations and reflections, odd little things – I’ve written reviews of imaginary movies, discoursed on the ecology of nonexistent animals.
I remember as a teenager, I built an entire fictional fantasy world, Loranth: maps, geography, races and animals, populations, everything. Never did anything with it, never showed it to anyone, I just got satisfaction from doing it.
I’ve done stuff that I’ve never shared with anyone. Often because I know I’ll be the only person interested in something so esoteric or off the wall. A regular person will look at it, and just not see the point.
Anyway, a few years ago, I was browsing the web and I found this topographic map of Mars. For those of you who aren’t up on your NASA, Mars is just a cratered reddish brown glob of a globe. There’s darker, there’s lighter, but it’s pretty dull.
Then about twenty years ago, they put a satellite up around the planet, a Global Surveyor, I think, that photographed the whole planet in extreme detail. I mean extreme detail – this was a level of resolution which would show up a buffalo as a couple of pixels. Not bad for twenty-thousand miles up. So any kind of elaborate structure – a boulder for instance, the size of a house, would show up.