Dear Friend,

I was listening to you. Really I was.

You were talking about that thing you did last week at that…place – wherever it was.

See? I was listening. I was listening very intently and then you talked about how somebody wrote something stupid on a rock somewhere on the trail – ah! yes, you were at a local park. See? Listening.

Anyway, you were wondering what idiot thought writing “Hung For Da Hoes” on a rock was art.

I told you I was listening. Well, up to that point. Then I started thinking about people a thousand years from now and how they were going to be reading “Hung For Da Hoes” on a rock and would they even know what that meant and what the hell would they think about us, as ancient people, based on that remark.

Because my brain does that, you understand. It goes off on these tangents.

And then it clicked.

I’m writing a book, you see, and kind of stuck in this one section where they find an ancient petroglyph (that’s writing on rocks, Google it) and I need the glyph to mean more than it seems and…then your remark slid into place and I realized I could use that because really, we’re just making suppositions about the crap ancient man drew on a rock, aren’t we?

Maybe the dude was saying something entirely different. And that thought led to another, then it opened a door and went down a passage way, grabbed a torch and stepped into a cave, struggled with a menacing shadow in a corner and burst into the center of my brain where it connected to three different crucial plot points.

So I did that goofy little thing with my mouth while my eyes went wide and my body twitched and I probably looked like I was having a seizure. But it’s okay, I was just writing.

In my brain.

Which is a good thing – getting the brain involved. When writing.

Gotta go before I forget it all now. But I was listening.

Honest, I was.