I'm not some great Author.

I'm not published, and I may never be published. One day I hope to hold my own book in my hand, but I don't follow market trends or try to write what's popular. None of that matters to me, because I've written since I could read. I'll be writing on my death bed. Because I know why, guys. I know why we're all doing this.

Writing is the language of life. No matter what you've done, no matter how you've changed throughout however many years of life, your writing is always there for you.

I was eight when I crafted my first narrative. It was a crappy fan-fiction, but I loved Starcraft and Buzz Lightyear. I wanted to be Sarah Kerrigan, leading the Alien knockoffs against boring, redneck humans, and I wanted Zeratul to have more narrative than the games gave him. So I changed the Buzz Lightyear of Star Command movie into a Starcraft story, with the space rangers as Protoss and Zurg as... the Zerg. It was horrible. I still have it. My kids love it.

When I was in Afghanistan I lost friends to pieces of trash and fertilizer combined into mines capable of peeling the armor off of tanks. I watched brothers, literal brothers, loose each other. They had joined together and trained together. Now, one walks with a cane, the other's soul haunts Afghanistan. That Marine was better than me, and he died. The only thing that kept me going was writing about those brothers; private stories that no one will see. In my stories about them they WON. Every time. They crushed their enemy.

When I almost died in Okinawa I was stuck in a hospital bed for a week, with forty-five days afterwards spent thinking my right arm would never work right again. But, while I was trapped in the barracks, I could still prop my gimp arm on a desk and write a nasty, sex filled cyberpunk romp. I didn't fantasize about blazing through the sprawl of Neo Tokyo, guns blazing; I wrote it. I lived it.

I wouldn't be alive if not for writing. Sure, I'd exist in the world somewhere. You'd see me walking around. I'd have a job, watch TV, like facebook stuff, but I'd be dead. I'd be one of a billion boring people tweeting their butt flexes for subs. I wouldn't be alive.

Writing helps us express our lives in ways nothing else will. Give us one paragraph, we will give you a whole new world to love, and break, and fuck, and cry for.

Please, never stop writing. Never stop telling stories. You know you love it.