We talked last week about my old friend and mentor Paul Rink’s advice to me when I told him I had just finished my first manuscript.

Signed copies and gift boxes of The Daily Pressfield are flying out the door and I’m depressed.

First, thanks to everybody who has jumped on board to order THE DAILY PRESSFIELD.

For my loyal friends of Writing Wednesdays, I have an announcement and a special offer…

Publishing “as if”—meaning, for an independent writer like me, to bring out a book AS IF it were from Random House, as if it were from Simon & Schuster—is a dream and a philosophy that my partner Diana and I have been trying to put into practice for the past two years.

When I wake up in the morning, I’m almost always in a bad mood. I’m irritable, I’m short-tempered, I’m grumpy.

This is going to be a long post. I want to tell you a story from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. It’s about a clash between my friend Lou Lenart and Yitzhak Rabin, who would go on to become prime minister of Israel and a great champion of peace—before he was assassinated by another Israeli on November 4, 1995.

We talked in last week’s post about being at the depths of one’s Wilderness Passage and how, in that hyper-conscious psychic condition, one becomes sensitized to what is true and what is false in any writing or art that we might read or view or listen to.

When I reached the depths of my own journey, living in an abandoned cinder-block house with no doors or windows, no electricity, no bathroom, and no running water, I found that my requirements for reading material had altered dramatically.