It all began in the second grade.

This affair with words, my self-indulgent means of expression.

When I was seven years old, I was suddenly possessed. A crippling doubt demon, with sharp horns and a crooked grin and blood-red skin, had manifested in my chest, making the Colorado air difficult to breathe. I realized I had a very important decision to make - what did I want to spend the rest of my life (or at least the next ten years) doing? I felt so behind, since two of my classmates had already discovered that their collaborative life purpose was to run away to California (over the Rocky Mountains in the thick of winter) to marry Leonardo DiCaprio in the wake of his performance in Titanic.

And so I pondered, weak, weary, juice-box-deprived, until it struck me like a finger of lightning, divine intervention. After I came out my electric coma, with crazed hair and slightly more crazed eyes, I proclaimed, "Writing! Writing, I say!" And with those words, the doubt demon abandoned my bones, slithering away until he found another unsuspecting second grader to wrap his slick tongue around. The sense of relief I felt was indescribably heart-opening. I immediately reached for a pen, and began to hear the stories I still, to this day, happily cannot silence.

However, my second grade teacher was concerned by this declaration, because the only stories I had written (to her knowledge) were those in a series of action-adventure picture books starring me and my favorite baby doll. Why she was so disturbed by these stories, I did not know, but it didn't matter (much) - I vowed then and there to prove to anyone who asked, challenged, or questioned, that authorship was my fate. It was not a choice I made (because I did not make the lightning strike), but one made for me that cannot now be unmade. I cannot escape this writer-me.

But why would I want to?