Mark Twain once said that to play on the fiddle it is not merely necessary to take a bow and fiddle with it.  I am ashamed to say that for the better part of the past twenty years, that’s exactly the approach I have taken with my writing…fiddling with it whenever I found the time.  I managed to convince myself that life, a career as a geeky programmer, and a family never left any time in the day for writing.  A strange thing happened to me that changed all that. 

I turned 40.

The pangs of an early middle-age crisis brewing compelled me to do something.  Too broke to buy a flashy sports car, and too damn tired to take on a mistress, I decided instead to stop fiddling with my writing and get to work.  For many, writing is a compulsion where satisfaction comes from creating some thing and calling it done.  For me, that's when the real pain begins, for to abandon that thing for the next ambitious spark is fiddling just the same.

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