Alder asked Mark Leidner:

What keeps you going? What keeps you writing day after day, and hell, what do you get up for in the morning?

Mark Leidner Writing functions both an escape from the most depressing aspects of life and also a way to confront them in an indirect or amusing way, so it's easy to keep going as a writer. Life would be much more stifling/punishing without the escape hatch writing provides, and life feel more meaningless without the methods of finding meaning that it provides. Though I guess if I stopped writing, I might soon find another way to escape/confront the limitations of living, but I wouldn't be nearly as good at it, whatever it was, so the escape would be less complete and the meaning found might not be as sustaining. Who knows.

As for getting up in the morning, getting up is much easier for me than going to bed. There are too many things I want to do so I often end up waking up too early and feeling very tired yet unable to go back to sleep. At night there are too many things I want to do too, so I end up putting off sleep until way past when I should have.

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