Yes, you look better than ever. I am too old to change, but I have decayed a bit < s >

>Charles a picture finally! I guess we've both changed since we met on Fort Bragg all those years ago in VFE training... :o)
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>>This thread is very close to my heart. I first became interested in personal computers in 1978 because I was fascinated by the idea of a word processor and the implications of being able to write in an analog rather than linear fashion.
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>>In the 60s I did all my work in college on an IBM Selectric and as I was a history major turning out hundreds of pages a semester and a procrastinator I always had to compose at the typewriter and rely on getting it right on first-draft. A recipe for writer's block. When I fell down the rabbit hole after college I took a very very portable typewriter with me.
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>>Then in California in the late 70s I found Applewriter - then Wordstar - then Wordperfect 5.1 - now Word ... and the ultra portable laptop was something I dreamed about before it existed because I wanted to do what I am doing right now - lie back propped up in bed and write. ( had an HP Omnibook with the popup mouse 15 years ago ) My handwriting has never been more than moderately legible at best but I type 100 wpm. Today if I have to do anything by hand more than write a check I find it a major inconvenince but my Dell XPS M1210 is never out of reach.
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>>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.
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>>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.
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>>But I still write and perhaps the next one will be for other people - with an eye to the market - but writing anything good means getting rich only by accident. But writing for the love of the language and the connection with others who know what it is to do it from the inside is always a reward.
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>>My first wife used to call it playing with my imaginary friends. The characters still dance for me and still have the power to surprise me with the things they do. Sometimes that is enough.
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>>I play piano for pretty much the same reasons - if I wanted to do it to be popular at parties I'd play different stuff - and then I wouldn't want to listen :-)
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>>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.
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>>Agape.
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>>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."
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>>As Thomas Hardy said, "While much is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened."
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>>>I wrote a dozen stories, maybe, and something that may qualify as a novel. Two stories even got published (first one got even paid, the second won a prize I never received). I'm writing, sort of, for 25 years now, and my opus could fit maybe two paperbacks :). I'm slow. Or rather, not so slow to write, but it takes me a looong time - weeks, months, to get back to it.
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>>>Want to talk about technique, down-to-Earth technique. I wrote only my first story on paper, because it was before I had my first computer (ZX Spectrum, yeah!). Then I didn't have an editor, so I wrote it as comments in a program - 10 REM it was a dark and stormy night...
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>>>Then I bought an editor, then another machine, then converted via floppies into pure text, took them to work, ran troff on them for formatting (on the VAX), then moved them to WordStar, to Atari's 1st Word, then to Word, then to HTML, and eventually into... HTML in memos. I've had a lot of fun programming my pencils :).
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>>>Once, after hurricane Isabel, we were without power for 11 days - and guess what, with nothing to do, I took a docket and started adding page after page. Could be that all those years of writing on paper do something to you, you get into the mood or something. I didn't have to change much when I put that on disk.
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>>>I still write very little on paper. Even my notes are just a few jotted lines - I don't know whether I use a whole sheet of paper a day.
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>>>So, ok, I've told my side of it, now you tell me yours and let me know if there's a good group therapy for (against?) this.