When I write, I'm free. How cliche is that? I'm sure that I said that for the first time when I was twelve, or something like that. It feels strangely immature to admit it again, but it's still true. On any given day I'm carrying around so many ideas, so many potential projects, so many paths to take... Writing is a way of pulling one of those threads out of the tangle and stretching it out, working out the knots, making it something real and true and good.

Well... sometimes good. I look back at the stuff I've written over the years and nine times out of ten, I can only cringe. I'm a child of genre, the offspring of pulp, and while I'll always enjoy the chliche'd stuff like oldschool scifi and cyberpunk and noiry mystery, I'm aware of my surroundings enough to know that those are not respectable branches of the literary family tree. Why should it matter to me? I don't know. I married an english lit major -- but even she is grudgingly acknowledging that science fiction deserves to stay (perhaps at the back of the bus, but still...)

I pause and return to the phrase that started this assignment: "When I write, I..."

I feel relief. LIke an itch being scratched, pressure released, a thirst quenched. I gotta do what I gotta do, and all that stuff. Years ago, at a writers' conference, the speaker asked all of us why we wrote. It was a Christian conference, so most of the answers revolved around having a gift from God or wanting to reach the world with the Gospel or something like that. I raised my hand and, when called upon, said simply: "If you don't keep writing, eventually you spontaneously combust."

I still think it's true. I'm not willing to take the chance.