Writers: Are you a Face-hugger, a Grub, a Maggot, Godzilla, or What?

(The writer Sir Tessa, in a contemplative moment, reciting Proust to a captive audience.)The Emerging Writer interview I conducted for Clarkesworld had an unexpected side effect--putting writers in mind of how they emerged, or how they would like to emerge; similar in a way to the secret I revealed in this blog post, about how writers molt.Sir Tessa instigated it, of course, with this interpretation of emerging: "I like the idea of 'emerging'. It puts me in mind of the headhuggers in Alien. The egg peels open, I extend my creepy-arse legs over the lip, I emerge, and then I leap at you, shove my gonads in your face and ram my proboscis down your throat and lay eggs in your chest, and then those eggs hatch and a wee bebe alien emerges. From your chest. At velocity. I would like to one day write a story that has that sort of effect on the reader. It would probably put me in gaol. Oh well. Totally worth it. You suffer for my art!"...which, after a chuckle between me and KJ Bishop led to Bishop's observation that she "was more like something discovered under a rock--a colourful grub, perhaps, like one of those painting maggots." (Although she added that now she's done emerging, 'I will be like a Japanese movie monster. I shall publish no more novels, in order to save Tokyo from destruction when I grow to be 100 feet tall with laser beams sizzling from my eyes.'" Don't ask how we got to that point...)When I think of how I "emerged," I was a creature with a long gestation period, something that had a long juvenile stage or stages. Some slow-growing cephalopod, suddenly scooped out of the sea by Michael Moorcock and genetically altered to live on land. And then undergoing further mutations year after year. Steady evolution--or devolution, depending on your point of view.But this metamorphosis through strange creatures, for fun or for keeps, isn't new. A member of Kafka's writing group saw him, prior to his fame, as a somewhat timid "moon-blue mouse."So, if you're emerging, how do you see yourself? And if you've already emerged, looking back, how did you emerge?