"You don't have to read all the way to the end, but I have to write all the way to the end. Hardly seems fair, does it?"
-- Jon Carroll
At this point in my life there is no choice about it. My life has been and will be as a writer. Now I feel like a failure and a self-indulgent embarrassment because so far I've only completed and published one book, and none of fiction. And chances are declining that I will publish other books, though I live as usual on the premise that I will. Meanwhile I've not done much else that looks very good on the balance sheet of life. (And to be fair, no much else on the negative side either.)
But I sure have written. I've written magazine articles, reviews, columns, essays, songs, verse, plays, jokes, and some pretty nifty stuff and nonsense for clients. I've been writing and publishing on the Internet for a decade now. Thousands and thousands of words. Some of the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the whole pieces, are pretty good. Some I recognize as me, and you won't get them anywhere else. But I can only write them for you. I can't read them for you.
