What if I already am all that I could be?

What if desired ambition is an illusionary drug manufactured by selfish genes designed solely to keep us alive, so that our selfish genes can survive?

Change, by definition, requires deconstruction of whatever came before. Creation, then, is change in a vacuum. Creation is change without all the messy destruction.

Sometimes I wake into disorientation, having just lived a moment ago so thoroughly elsewhere. Am I remembering a dream, or reality? I wonder if I’m waking when I wake, or when I fall asleep.

..but there may be some treasure to be had in storytelling.

I don't have enough life left to live all the lives I want to live..

The good news is the number of lives I've lived is far greater than the number I can remember.

The bright glare of youth blinds you to the rushing road beneath your feet. You think only of all your life ahead of you, far more road before you then behind, and you eagerly race toward it.

Then life actually happens, insidiously, but you are barely aware of the increased speed of travel. You get accustomed to moving at nearly the speed of light. Everyone else is, so you don't even know you are.

Then, at some point, you slow down, hopefully by choice but sometimes not. And you realize there is far more road behind you then before you.

Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, and if you read often, a book comes along that transports, impresses, and validates. Kayla Rae Whittaker’s “The Animators” does all that. She writes with an efficiency and accuracy that will hold you until only the story decides to let you go, and no sooner, and she knows how to lead you down paths fraught with speed bumps and pot holes and an occasional and precisely timed emotional nuke.

This is one of those books that makes you say, “This is why I keep reading. This is why I can never stop writing.”

How to Success by Corinne Caputo is, without question, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. The honest cluelessness on each page is like reading a how-to on brain surgery by someone who’s never cut so much as a watermelon, and probably hasn’t come closer to using a knife than watching a YouTube clip on slicing fruit, but has all the trust and confidence that they can, indeed, perform brain surgery and have it result in a positive outcome.

Every page is funny (“How to come out as a writer to your parents”) or irreverent(“How to bring up your book at parties!”) or maybe quasi-useful (“Math problems for writers”).

But unsaid throughout the book is the idea that you can get it done – you can write a novel, or a memoir, or a screenplay. All you need is to do it. Do it wildly, do it badly, do it loudly..but do it.

You can’t edit what isn’t written. And maybe fortune, awards, and fame await. If they do, you’ll have practiced taking an author photo and signing autographs (things to do before writing that bestseller. 😉

Full disclosure – Corinne is also my daughter, but it makes the book no less funny.

Fear has all the gravitational pull of a black hole, preventing anyone from making positive progress.

Courage, faith, trust, hope, dreams, support from those we love – this is the fuel mixture that lets us burn hot enough and fast enough to achieve escape velocity.

The level of trust demanded by the writing muses is staggering. Every time I feel I’m writing a significant moment (which always feels more like I’m documenting something happening before me, but that’s a whole separate post) I rarely know why, but I feel weight of the scene. Then, hundreds or thousands of words later, the “ah hah!” moment clubs me in the back of the head and I’ll know why that scene needed to stay.

I just hate not knowing ahead of time. The engineer and scientist in me lives in a petri dish of reason and fact, and is at odds with the artist, who happily burns brightly in a crucible of creative energy.