When I was seven years old, I began to listen to the voices in my head. I wouldn't dare talk about the beings in my brain, for fear I'd end up in a padded cell somewhere, but I obeyed their every command.

If I closed my eyes,  these imaginary friends--whom I came to refer to as characters, as they were quite entertaining--brought me to places I'd never been, introduced me to cultures I'd never seen, and dared me to try things I wasn't allowed to contemplate in my young life. Fish eggs come to mind, as well as parachuting from what was then known as the world's tallest building, the Sears Tower. I daydreamed lives I didn't live. I smiled a lot. I breathed easy. What might have seemed abnormal to my peers was pure serenity in my mind.

These dreams I turned out onto paper, usually in poetic form. I learned to love words, and by second grade, I'd begun to make my own dictionary. This spiral-bound notebook contained big words--imminent, pontificate, obligatory--words I'd found while  thumbing through Webster's. I made it my ambition to expand my vocabulary. After all, if I was going to write all the time, I couldn't very well continue to use the same words over and over again.

Poems became songs became stories became plays. Finally, at age fourteen, amidst all the expected angst (and some unanticipated trauma) of the teenaged soul, I turned out my very first full-length novel. I'd put faces to the voices in my head...and I started telling their tales to anyone who'd listen. I've been writing consistently, several novels at once, ever since.

"So...you like to write, huh?" I can't tell you how many times I've heard such a question. Harper Lee's Scout Finch likens reading to breathing. One does not love breathing, Scout reasons. In this vein, I don't love writing. I do it because I breathe, that's all.

Few people have understood my compulsion to write, but then again, how well does anyone understand another? If you share my neurosis, please feed it. That which starves will never survive.

-Penny Dawn