I'd always been a reader. My parents started me on books at an 
early age, and my memories of my first grade class include five-year-old 
impatience with my classmates for reading so slow. But my 'tastes', if 
preferences for genre could be assigned to someone so young, ran toward 
fantasy more than anything else. I loved dragons. My father had tried to 
attract me to science fiction when I was about eight with a book called 
Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey, but I got so confused by the spaceships in 
the first few pages that I left it unopened on the shelf.
	Then, one fateful day, a friend in 5th grade handed me a book by 
Robert Anson Heinlein.
	I didn't know what I'd set my hands on, but I loved it. The book 
was called The Sixth Column, and was a typically patriotic anticommunist 
1950s book about a group of scientists saving America from the invading 
Asians. I didn't understand the politics, I didn't get over half the 
jokes, but the technology! Scientists making magic with machines! 
Tricking the bad guys into thinking they had real magic, while their 
wonderful new techie toys saved the world! I lapped it up like honey. 
Then my friend's brother handed me a wacky book by Douglas Adams called 
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I learned more about aliens 
then I'd picked up from Star Trek. I went back to Dragonsdawn and picked 
up ideas about gene-splicing and other worlds, colony ships and human 
behavior. My dad gave me Niven's Ringworld, and I was awed with huge 
superhuman creations in space.
	I moved on. After devouring everything by Niven, and McCaffrey, I 
picked up Roger Zelazny. Then I rediscovered Heinlein, and read through 
his future history. Soon I was digging through my dad's back issues of 
Analog, and I discovered Spider Robinson and his bar called Callahan's. 
Back to McCaffrey and Niven for more of the FT&T universe and Known 
Space, and everything else on the shelves. I kept reading. Science was 
fascinating, and the more I learned the more I read. I knew about folded 
space and multiple dimensions before I got to algebra and about the 
effects of vacuum before I learned about photosynthesis. Then I found out 
that science fiction authors also wrote fantasy, and like a cat chasing 
my own tail I headed back to my earlier love for dragons. But now I found 
new wonders, in magic and unicorns and cats that talked. I found urban 
fantasy, with elves driving racecars and horses that turned into 
motorcycles. Mercedes Lackey, Larry Dixon, Zelazny again, Marion Zimmer 
Bradley, Melanie Rawn, and others all found space on my ever-full 
shelves. My piles at the bookstore were legendary. I hunted through the 
shelves for the next story by whatever author I was craving that day. But 
even with all the reading my brain could handle, something was missing - 
and when I started putting pencil to paper, I figured it out.
	Writing.
	I learned that I love to write. There was this fanatic need to 
create boiling up inside me, and I'd been keeping it pacified with small 
nibbles of writing assignments and poetry. But when I started churning 
out something that was actual science, something that wasn't actually 
assigned, but created for the purpose of creating, I found a new, 
complete high.
	I never stopped reading science fiction, but I wrote, every day, 
sometimes only a sentence or two but always putting pencil to paper. I 
started story after story, sometimes never intending to finish, just 
writing for the joy of it. It was the spark of creation that drove me, 
the need to put something down. I found my outlet, science fiction and 
fantasy, and it drove me, hounded me to work.
	Heinlein once described the condition of being a writer as having a 
monkey on your back that chatters at you until you sit down and actually 
write. I never had a monkey, but actual story ideas clamoring inside my 
head. Whole scenes formed out of dialogue and begged to be put on paper. 
I started writing fan fiction about my favorite shows, and then, holy of 
holies, actually posting the completed stories online where they could 
get response.
	To be truthful, I never expected a response. But I actually got 
fan-mail, something I had only dreamed of. After getting that first piece 
of mangled English passed through at least six servers and a cheap web-
mail provider, I knew what I had to be when I left college.
	A writer.
	Reading wasn't enough. Creating wasn't enough. Even publishing 
wasn't enough. Getting response,  knowing that I'd touched someone and 
that they had enjoyed reading my work, was the best feeling I'd ever had, 
and one that I came to crave stranger than any drug. Getting published, 
really published, is the next step, one I'm not sure I'll ever take, but 
one that might finally satisfy the burning in my blood.
	Of course, it may make the fire burn all the stronger. I welcome 
the immolation gladly.