You know you’re a novelist when:

• The characters you’re writing about seem more real to you (and often more interesting) than the people sitting around your dinner table.
• You think reading the thesaurus is fun.
• You refuse to quit smoking, drinking bourbon, bingeing on M&M’s or [insert bad habit here] because you believe that if you quit, you’ll never be able to write again, and your novels are more important than your health.
• Your idea of dressing for work is swapping the sweats you sleep in for the sweats you write in.
• You consider going to the movies “research.”
• You bring a laptop with you to Little League games so you can get some writing done between innings.
• You see nothing unusual about receiving fifty emails a day.
• You ask inappropriate questions of people you’ve just met.  (“You’re a physician?  That’s great, because I was wondering, if someone got stabbed in the back, where exactly would the knife have to enter his body so he wouldn’t bleed to death?”)
• You care more about how you look in your dust-jacket photo than how you looked in your wedding pictures.
• You use hotel stationery to jot down story ideas that come to you while you’re on vacation.
• You receive a phone call informing you that your daughter vomited in the middle of her third-grade gym class, and you tell the school nurse, “I’ll pick her up as soon as I finish this chapter.”
• The working title of your current project is The Book From Hell (which, ironically, was also the working title of your previous project, and the one before that.)
• You listen to Mark Cohn singing “Walking in Memphis” five times a day because his voice sounds kind of like the way you imagine your hero’s voice sounding.
• The word “revisions” causes you to break into a cold sweat.
• You arrive at the supermarket with absolutely no memory of having driven there, because you were puzzling out a plot point during the drive.
• You own four different books listing names for babies.
• You occasionally find yourself thinking that flipping burgers in a fast-food restaurant must be more fun than what you’re doing.
• You use the word “Alphie” to refer to a portable word processor, not a movie starring Michael Caine or Jude Law.
• You spend hours engaged in an internal debate over whether “hadn’t” works better than “had not” in a particular sentence.  And then, once you decide to go with “hadn’t,” you wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “I should change it back to ‘had not.’”
• You get tennis elbow not from playing tennis but from overusing your mouse.
• Calamity strikes-a fender-bender, a flood, a scary diagnosis, a love affair gone sour-and you react by saying, “I’ll get a book out of it.”
• You believe all reviewers are insane, except for the ones who give your books five stars.
• You accompany every blog post you write with the cover art for your next novel in the faint, feeble hope that people will remember you’ve got a book coming out soon and that (oh, please, oh, please!) they’ll buy it, and that (really, if it isn’t asking too much) they’ll like it.