Castle had a murder board in his office that he used to plan his novels. Secretly, he collected office supplies so he would never be left wanting if he was suddenly inspired and needed to organize his thoughts. Of course he seemed fun-loving and frivolous, he had a reputation to protect… but at the core of it all, he was a writer, and writer's had their eccentricities.
He typed almost everything, for convenience sake, but he kept a notebook in every room because he liked the realness of the lines. There was comfort in writing the old fashioned way, and he liked how the words looked on a page when they were scratched and inconsistent. Sometimes, when he found himself itching for that word-fix, his fingers would twitch and dance until he found blank paper and something to mark it up with.
It was only right he played poker with other writers. They knew that feeling… they understood the drive. Was he an addict? Maybe. Words couldn't blacken his lungs like cigarettes… words didn't put a needle in his vein. As far as vices went it wasn't the worst. And hell, he got paid to do it.
Still, there were things about this job – this life—that went unsaid. He never talked about his routine if he could help it. No one wanted to know that he could only write a death scene if it was after sunset. No one cared that he needed absolute silence to pen the first two pages of a new manuscript. It was irrational, he knew, those little compulsions that comprised his process. He made up for it with his in depth, hands on research. With his very public search for inspiration, there was no need to question how he wrote... just so long as he did. And he always did.
Balzac said it best... a writer is nothing more than a slave to pen and ink.