Welcome to the podcast. This is episode 361. My name is Douglas Wilson. Glad you're here. Glad you decided to join us. So I wanted to get a little personal in this opening segment today and talk about how I write. I'm not sure that I consider the topic all that fascinating,

but people do ask me about it. And when I answer this sort of question, people act interested.

So there you are. So I want to talk about how I write. And then this is going to tie in with my

book review later on in this episode of the podcast. So one of the things I tell people is that I write

for the same reason that dogs bark. I just do.

It's not something that I'd really have any control over.

I guess I could,

I guess I could make a decision on a particular day,

or I'm not going to write today,

or I could do that,

but is just something that I think I was

built to do. I remember thinking for the first time when I was in sixth grade that I wanted to make

books. The call came early. My father was a colporter, meaning that he was a literature

minister. He opened Christian bookstores and ran them as ministry outlets, where he would

distribute Christian literature and use it as a place from which to evangelize and do

sorts of things. So I grew up around books. So my home, my family was a family of readers. My parents

were both readers. And they read to us. And I remember one year going down to help my dad conduct an annual inventory of the stock

at his bookstore, which we helped him do.

And then we were paid in books.

You got to pick out a title, take it home.

So I grew up in a book-loving family, and my dad was a writer.

He was not, at the time, when I was young, he was not a prolific writer, but he was a writer,

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