How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?

~Paul Sweeney

Life never unfolds exactly as expected.  Hoping it will is only swatting at fog.  Days transpire, weeks disappear, and we are often engaging our best when we simply catch up, and catch our breath.  We keep our eyes fixed on what’s coming and then accept it when it does; remain thankful for all we have that works well, and arrange to change what doesn’t.

We cannot stop life from happening.  It goes on every day, with or without us.  It follows us everywhere, surrounding us everywhere we go, no different from the air we breathe.

We never know how that first drift will flutter the next, so it is paramount that we regard our moments as each a possible precursor to the last; forever holding our head in the now, while never forgetting to flick our eyes at the horizon and whatever prize we’ve placed beneath, while understanding that there are few things we can simply compel to happen.

When big things happen suddenly, there is often unreasonable cost attached.
Like a tsunami, or avalanche.
Life, at its best, happens bit by tiny bit.

Does the caterpillar know what he will one day be?

Probably not.

One thing Daisy’s always said, though only now am I hearing it in the way she’s always meant it: “We mustn’t ever skip our steps.”

I love our modern world, but when I can download nearly anything I’m in the mood for, and less than a decade from losing the nearly altogether, how can I remain humble while looking patience in the eye.  More important, how can I teach this to my children?

There’s an order to life, and to most things we say we want and are willing to work for.  Skipping even a single step, often means misunderstanding or misapplying something in the future.  If we consider we’re here only once, this seems precarious and unnecessary.

My biggest one to grow on during my twenties was patience.  Fortunately, life saw fit to outfit me with the ultimate foe of an impatient man: first a girl and then a boy.
I’m more patient than I used to be, but I still have a million miles to meander.
Last Friday, I was in the middle of telling Daisy about my brand new idea - the new one.  This was the one that would change everything, allow us to scale our next summit, and plant a flag deep inside all future possibility.  A good fifteen minutes had passed since the last idea and, since it was getting late, it was perfectly possible that a better idea would not arrive before the dawn.

“Sweetheart,” Daisy said.  She put her hand on my forearm to stop me from pacing, then pulled me down on the couch beside her.  “You need to find your Friday.”

This last week saw me celebrating my new life as a full time writer by piling even more onto my ridiculously heaping [...] Continue Reading…

“You can’t wait for inspiration.  You have to go after it with a club.”

~Jack London

NaNoWriMo has been less productive for me than I had hoped, but still better than I had any right to expect.  I’m eking along, a few pages a day. Yes, I am lagging far behind, and yes, I am okay with it.  I’ll be thrilled if I end the month with an engaging outline for a future novel.  Any freelance work which comes my way must share the front seat alongside the promising guest posts that are lined up.

The month is nearly half over, and I’m still well inside the walls of the first act.  I do, however have a fairly good idea about where the story is going, which is a lot more than I could have said two weeks ago. This is the final few hundred words of the opening chapter.  I hope you enjoy, and please feel free to critique it below.  I chose this particular section because I feel as though it does an adequate job of displaying the setting and I didn’t have too much to choose from.

RedBook:
Billy slid his finger across the glass, then pulled manual control from the on board computer.  He dragged his thumb in a neat line across the bar of green dashes until the glass was a straight line of crimson, each dash darkening beneath his drifting thumb.  A few nearly silent words fell from the side of Billy’s mouth, and the Skyler soared into a full throttle; launching upward in a single straight shot, fifteen seconds into the sky.  It teetered for a single second, with barely a mislaid milisecond of momentum, then hovered into a perfect horizontal.

“Three…two…one,” Conner counted quietly to himself.  There was a split second boom that somehow sounded both deafening and quiet, and then the Skyler wrinkled the blue sky at six-hundred kilometers per hour, just as the bones of the planet’s biggest factory for the world’s only narcotic collapsed inside a crumbling sink hole.

“You weren’t kidding,” Billy said a few decibels too loud, his ears ringing from the force of the blast.

Conner was silent.  He collapsed in his chair, stared out the window, and wondered for the thousandth time what life would have been like if he had been born just one generation earlier.  He had read plenty of histories and seen enough footage to last a dozen lifetimes, but Conner could never quite place himself in those final few years before the Great Melancholy, back when technology had finally outrun philosophy and left the world buried beneath a tsunami of chaos.  Of course there had been those few who had seen it coming, but even they could not have imagined it unfolding as fast as it did.

It was two decades later and the world was mostly safe, though safe was a synonym for antiseptic.  Conner lived in a world where illegal drugs had been wiped from the planet.  There were few alive willing to taint [...] Continue Reading…