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As for what I am working on - well had a reading of my violin duos I wrote a few months ago and accordingly made some excellent revisions. Recording will happen this week. Still working slowly on my piano quintet. Hopefully I will have the first movement complete by early April. Yet I am excited because I never wrote a movement which lasted over 8 minutes - it is up to 9.5 and I forsee it being between 12 - 14 minutes. I noticed that for piano quintets it is not unusual for the first movement or more than one mvmt to exceed 8 minutes. I think there is something about the rich textures possible with piano and string quartet which lend it to longer durations of music.

As one of the older ones (maybe the oldest), I enjoy talking about music. This is a place where I can be myself. How many places are there where you can talk about nerd-like details of composing? It has also been a pleasure getting to know other people across the world like Phil, Jason, Justin, Robert, Daniel, and Tyler (just to name a few.) As far as my composing, this has been a place where I can show scores to people who understand what I am trying to do and catch a mistake or two. I enjoy my time here on Young Composers Forum!

No, but it would make it easier. A lot of the stuff taught in formal training is now available to anyone online and in books (which can be purchased online and sometimes read there to). Formal education makes it easier and you have more guidance, but one can still be completely self-taught and be a very good composer.

don't make 12 threads at one time

Yeah it does borrow from the parallel minor - D minor. When you borrow from the parallel minor it is called "simple mixture". So if you are in D major, the chord on the sixth degree would be a B minor chord. But in D minor there exist the possibility of a B flat major chord because of the ascending minor scale. Also, it sounds like you are using a G minor chord that returns to D major (or whatever major key it is in). That is a nice use of "simple mixture" too. Say in D major you want to end a piece but you had this nice minor section and you want to refer to it (plus in game in music and film it always suggests the resolution of some sort of conflict to the very end). Well in D major you could modify the typical IV-I progression. Have D as your root and have d-f-gflat as the notes of one chord go to d-f#-a. The IV becomes minor - again borrowed from D minor where the 6th degree can be flattened.