Well, why the hell not? He hadn’t written a single word all day and missing his Daily Duty was adding to his jumpiness.

Well, “Daily Duty” was what he called it in public. In private he called it “the Disease,” because that was what it was. P. Frank Winslow couldn’t not write. When he wasn’t actually putting words on the screen, he was thinking about the words he was going to put on the screen next time he sat down. He’d mentioned it to a doctor once who called it a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Always thinking about writing was the obsessive part; his inability to stay away from the keyboard was the compulsive component. The doc said OCD was treatable.

But Frankie couldn’t afford treatment. Oh, he could afford the pills, but treating the OCD might very well drop his word count. Many times he found he couldn’t stop and he’d go past the 2,000-word target—often enough to bring his annual word count to somewhere in the neighborhood of a million.

A million words sounded like a lot, and it was, and he divided them up between his pseudonyms—thrillers under his own name, horror-SF as Phillip F. Winter, and paranormal romance as Phyllis Winstead. But after his agent and the taxman took their cuts, and he helped pay for his mother’s assisted living back in Pennsy, all he could afford in the city was that crummy walk-up on Avenue D that now he missed so much. Yeah, he could have shared a place with someone, or found nicer digs in the outer boroughs, but both of those choices were anathema. P. Frank Winslow lived and worked alone, and NYC was the only place to do it.

He prided himself on having no illusions and no literary aspirations. Not these days, anyway. Starting out, he’d planned to make a big splash in the literary world, but decided to hone his writing chops in genre fiction first. He found it came naturally, and he made money at it, so he kept writing the stuff. It got to the point where he couldn’t afford to take off the extended time he’d need to write that big serious novel—the bills arriving every month wouldn’t want to hear about it.

He doubted now that he’d ever really had the capacity to explain the human condition. Hell, how could he explain something that had always baffled him? So instead he’d settled on simply trying to make the reader turn the page. He figured he was destined from the start to write pulp, and so he accepted his fate. His target became the gut, not the intellect. He was pressing readers’ buttons to trigger visceral responses, and he was good at it. If readers felt like they’d been on an emotional rollercoaster after finishing one of his novels, cool: job well done.

And as for the old Where do you get your ideas? question, he had a simple answer: dreams. His subconscious had a seemingly endless reserve of stories it told him while he slept, which he transcribed into novels while awake.