I've always liked writing. Back when I was a kid, writing may have even seemed easier to me than speaking at times; I wasn't a particularly good speaker then, and I'm not one now, although I've found ways to cope. I slur my words a bit, my voice is a bit nasal, I sometimes even stutter; I'm not a great listen. Writing works around all this and more.

When I became a teenager I liked the idea of writing for a career, but it didn't happen. I've written several first pages of novels, that's for sure. But for some reason no second or subsequent pages, ever. For some time I thought that it was just that I liked the idea of writing more than writing itself, as I'm sure is relatively common among people. Surely that was a component, but now I wonder if it was also that I just didn't have anything to say back then. Now I feel more compelled to writing down my thoughts; perhaps because, at some level, I know that now (in my 30s) my thoughts are starting to become what they will be; no longer I'm mostly potential, but I've reached a point in which I can start to think that my thought patterns are becoming fixed.