Month: September 2012
I’m just home from two weeks’ vacation—and gearing up to get back to work. The first thing I’ll do is stop myself from thinking in terms of immediate gratification. I will make myself think, instead, in blocks of time. I will not put pressure on the first day, or even the first week. Resistance would love me to do that. Resistance knows that if I try to do too much too soon, I’ll fail. Resistance would love to see that happen. So I will remind myself that the enemy is not time. The enemy is Resistance. The wide receiver returning…
Read MoreI don’t want to get up. This thought hits me at about 4:30 AM every morning. It comes in the voice of the animated devil sitting on my shoulder, a la the old Tom and Jerry cartoons. The little angel on the other shoulder always responds by climbing into my head and yelling, get up, lazy—almost as annoying as a soccer stadium filled with four-year olds going to town with vuvuzelas. For the most part, the devil doesn’t say much. I rarely hear his voice. He just sits around grinning. The angel is the vocal one because she’s the key…
Read More[The blog is on vacation this week. Here’s a favorite post from 2009. Back soon!] What happens to us as artists when our personal lives crash and burn? When we’ve lost our spouses or our homes or our minds; when we’ve been betrayed or, worse, betrayed someone else; when it’s three in the morning and sunrise feels like it’s never going to come? Here’s my experience: some of my best work has been done when my personal life was in chaos. This seems to make no sense. How can we do good work when it’s all we can do to…
Read MoreWe had a birth in the family recently—my nephew Justin and his wife Lissa had a healthy baby boy, whom they named Bryce. It got me to thinking about the concept of the Big Payoff. The Big Payoff is central to the American dream. In Westerns, it’s claiming that ten-thousand-acre spread where Ma and Pa can raise the young-uns. In gangster flicks, it’s the last big job that the criminal pulls, when he takes down the U.S. Mint. For the Vegas gambler, the big payoff is the jackpot. For you and me, it might be the dream job, the fantasy…
Read MoreI heard this from Gen. James Mattis a couple of years ago when he was speaking at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. It has proved invaluable to me as a writer. Gen. Mattis was talking to a roomful of young officers. The subject was command and control in combat. If we’re the senior officer, how can we, in the heat and confusion of action, control the men and units beneath us? And if we’re the junior officer, how can we get help and advice from our seniors above? Mattis cited Admiral Horatio Nelson, England’s greatest naval hero. On the…
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