I've been writing fiction for years, most of that time in secret. People knew generally that I wrote stuff, but I had a great excuse for being vague about it. I'm a journalist. Of course I write stuff.

When I'm out and about with my novelist hat on, things change. The other day I made my first visit to the city of Essen's spanking new historical archive. My novel is set in 1946-47, and I've exhausted just about all resources I can get the usual ways. I needed more primary documents. I needed the archive.

The friendly archivist named Cordula sat me down in a side room for  a little conference. What was my project? What did I need?

"Well, I'm a journalist," I began. There I was again, trying to put some official blanket over what I was there for. Journalism is (almost? sometimes?) respectable. Writing a novel is a hobby. At least to the dabblers out there who rush their work into print via self-publishing, the web or whatnot. My novel isn't a hobby. I work at it as hard as anything else, if not harder. And I do it for free. But only for now. I intend to see it published well. That's why I was at the archive. I want to get my facts right in my fiction.

My journalist notebook on the table, my pen tapping the pages, I finally said it. "I'm writing a novel set in Essen during the famine winter of 1946. . ." I didn't tell Cordula the plot or who the characters are. I didn't say a word about that cool scene I wrote the other night when I sat back, finished, and thought, "Wow, you outdid yourself, cookie." I stuck to the facts and topics I was looking for, the little details that populate a good historical novel.

Cordula had a handful of great sources up her sleeve. The longer we talked about them, the more I realized something. She treated my requests the same as if I'd walked in asking for sources for a newspaper article or a TV documentary. My novel is just as important. The whole project, done in secret for so long, felt more real.

It felt good. But I'm not going to start telling the postman or my neighbor's dog that I'm writing a novel. Just a few people need to know. Close family and friends. And the people who can help directly with the book -- the people I talk to who lived through Germany's famine winter, and the archivist who can help me bring the time period to life.

I don't know why I was so shy about it.