China Mieville is my new hero—as much I have heroes.

I couldn't put down Perdido Street Station. Now I'm feeling the melancholy of a finished book that I can't return to. Even if I tried to reread it immediately, the thrilling uncertainty would be gone. (I have tried to anyway.) I'm already familiar with his vocabulary, learning it so I can use it to re-enter the story from my world and to remind me of the author and his craft.

The story moves along at a classic kind of pace and in predictable directions, but it brims with environment. Like my favorite literary visionaries, he created a world conscious of itself. And I couldn't plumb its dimensions no more than I could a stranger's. I perceive only within the limits of my observational ability, which is minute in contrast to the creation's omniscience.

The truth is I haven't read such delicious language for maybe a year. I don't know what I have been reading instead, but it hasn't been rich or nourishing in that way that careful and rotund narratives are. This stuff is good for my head.

But what makes China (May I call you China?) my hero is that he is a novelist and he's studying for his Ph.D., among other career pursuits. I have always written, long before I ever thought of becoming a psychologist, but it's the latter that I always think I should cultivate. Gametic ideas burst from me from time to time, but they are reabsorbed before they germinate. And so, I never think of myself as a novelist or poet, or writer.

But you know, as much as I deny being a writer, the truth is that I write an awful lot, even if it's not the novels or poetry I think I'm capable of writing. And the other undeniable truth: I now sometimes earn my living as a writer, which is exciting. It's so much more fun than editing and, when I am immersed in writing like that, language clamors at me. I can't stop jotting down things, and my speech becomes more elegant and agile—it's, like, there, on demand.

Lately, I have been thinking that there might be room to be both a writer and a psychologist (if I really do want to be the psychologist...); that maybe it is necessary.

And then I read what China had to say: "At the time I wouldn't have been able to live off the writing and I also thought that you couldn't really take writing for granted as I wanted to be an academic. Plus I enjoy research and I enjoy academia so I decided to try and do both."

In other news: UFS is five years old, and this weekend marks two years living in my apartment. I can't believe it; it's all very cool.