>And I collect my writing in snippets and play with them on the screen and reprocess them through my eyes and brain and then recreate them with my fingers and just enjoy the whole process.

My writer's paralysis comes from thinking in snippets. I catch a bit here, invent a bit there, put it somewhere and completely forget to do anything with them. Probably comes from what I regularly write: code, emails, IMs and forum messages. I may have become a short form addict :).

>Twenty years ago I did this: www.headhunterjazz.com because it had to be done before i could do anything else. Wrote it for me. Ross Thomas was my first reader and loved it and that was all the validation I needed. I'll probably never write anything again I like as much.

I'm on chapter three, but had to tab back here or I'd never finish this message :).

>But with the writing or the the piano it is always about process - about going clear - about the moment that never comes often enough but makes it all worth it when it does - the moment when you know you are not the train, but the track.
>
>Agape.

>My life had not been ... orthodox. I always figured the only way it would make any kind of sense was if my tombstone were to read "He was gathering material for a book."

After all the interesting times, I can already see that the trip was fun. Or in the words of my college years, crazy and unforgettable. In the end, it almost doesn't matter where it ends.

>As Thomas Hardy said, "While much is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened."

Or as a good friend of mine uses to say, "life is stranger than shi*".