"Who is master here? The man or his work?"


That's like one of those questions, "Which came first? Thought or
language?" Can you really have thought without language? And how can
you develop language without thought?" (See the stuff on the breakdown
of the bicameral mind for some on this.)


That's a question I don't think any reasonable writer can answer. At
times, a lot of the time, really, I'm not entirely sure. There's the
talent, and the vessel, and sometimes the latter seems a poor vehicle for
the former. The story, once set in motion, takes on a life of its own.
To a very large extent, what I do when I write an episode is to peek into
the B5 universe and find out what happened there that week. Sometimes I'm
as much surprised as anyone else by what these characters have gotten
themselves into *this* time.


The flip side, of course, is that there's an awful lot of me in this
story, in the characters, the situations, the questions that get explored
in the course of the story. I'm working through a lot of issues here,
no question. It's my hope that there's enough interest in those issues
and questions to affect others.


On that level, it's a very personal show. And it consumes ever
waking hour of my life. I think I've kind of lost track of where the line
is between "the man and the work." It's all the same.


jms