TXRed as Mod: One of Dave’s earliest posts, from 2011 (!) about the life of a writer. 

Dave Freer posting:

Or why writers are in fact a race apart.

If there is one thing I don’t believe in it’s this special race stuff, be it the chosen people, or the wonder of Aryans or the inferiority/superiority of Morlocks and Eloi. Yet I have come to realise that in a self selected way, writers are a in special case. (Well, when chopped up they can fit into several special cases, or  even suitcases. Or if diced, into clutch bags for the nights at the opera, although this is a fate I feel should be reserved for the authors of literary works of art.)

It hit me this afternoon like a bolt of lightning… except it was more like a knife sliding through meat and into the spinal column of the dead wallaby I was cutting up. I hit the spine with a little rasping crunch, a tactile sensation carried up the knife  blade and I thought: I must remember exectly how that felt. I must find the words to describe this, to capture it precisely. To let people who have never and will never cut into the cartilaginous sheath on the joints between the vertebrae know how it feels and how it sounds, and what raw meat carries to senses. The smell of iron and of blood. The slight tactile stickyness of hung meat…

Then I realised that for many years now I have been slowly drifting away from non-writer humans. They are content to experience and, if you ask them about it afterwards, will sometimes be able to tell you what they experienced, capturing the little details that bring the scene (if not the Wallaby) to life. Writers… writers however find themselves experiencing… and taking notes.  I should advise against this in those intimate little moments–your partner may find it distracting and possibly disturbing  if, midway, you leap away from him/her and frantically hunt a pen and paper.  On the other hand, I’ve caught myself ‘taking notes’ at some of the most bizarre and inappropriate times – losing control on a dirt corner, losing my temper…

So do you do this?  Or am I my own subspecies?  And what’s the most inappropriate/bizarre  ‘only a writer could do this’ that you’re guilty of?