The first book I ever published was a science fiction title, Citadel: First Colony. It was the end result of a few weeks of hanging out with my brother-in-law and a good friend of mine, drinking coffee and noshing at a local Panera Bread, dreaming and jotting down notes for a web series we wanted to produce. This was in the days before Netflix and Hulu and other streaming services. We had plans to launch this thing as 10-minute episodes on YouTube (10 minutes being the limit on length, at the time).

Things didn’t quite work out for us on producing the show, but as an exercise in getting a deeper understanding of the plot and the characters, I decided to write what is known in the business as a treatment. It’s basically a document that tells the story of a film or show, in prose, so that it can be handed over as part of a pitch. Writers will often put a treatment together to give to a prospective investor or someone at a studio.

I thought that if we had a treatment, I could better understand the story, and that might make it easier to start penning scripts.

What ended up happening instead was that the treatment expanded to become a novel. and then that novel became the first in a trilogy. And a novelist’s career was born.

Fast forward to 2015. I had about 30 books out, covering mostly science fiction and fantasy. I was doing ok—everyone who actually read the books loved them. But I was not doing great. Not as well, financially, as I hoped, anyway.

At that point in my career I’d gone all-in on being a part of the indie author scene. I was hosting my show, The Wordslinger Podcast, and I was also a co-host or host or guest host on at least seven other shows, including co-hosting with Nick Thacker and Justin Sloan on Self Publishing Answers. 

Before Justin came along, Nick and I hosted SPA together, and we used it as a space to discuss not only the business but our own work, what we were learning, how it was going, etc. And on one episode, we talked about genre. It was on that episode that Nick said he thought I could crush it as a thriller writer, and he dared me to write one. I took that dare.

Ok, so back to 2015—I started working on said thriller. At that point I was full-time as an author, but wasn’t getting quite the paycheck I felt I needed. Switching genres felt a little intimidating, so I decided I would write a one-off book, just to win the dare, and see how it went. And because I hadn’t really written a thriller before, and wasn’t sure how much time and effort I wanted to invest in the process, I decided to “cheat.”

There’s a dirty secret in the author world. Every author has this, and most don’t talk about it. And it can be called by and thought of in a variety of names and terms. For me, it is what I call “my thirds.”

My thirds—as in the first third of a book. The started but unfinished work, the exploration of an idea that I was excited enough about to start but didn’t have the integrity or heart or energy to finish. My thirds had always been my shame. Work left unfinished weighs heavier than the work of seeing things through.

Every author has something like this. Story starts, orphaned chapters, widowed plots—there are many names. In the comics world there’s a concept known as the “ash bin,” where fragments of script and dialogue, as well as rough sketches or even finished panels, get dumped. They might be pulled out later, dusted off, and put into service in some other story. But for now, they’re ash. Wasted, burned, not worthy.

I actually have a little folder in Scrivener, my writing tool of choice, that I call my “Ash Bin,” where I dump scenes I pull from books while editing. I always think, “I’ll come back and use this some day.” But so far I rarely have.

On the other hand, I also have my “thirds,” which are the abandoned ideas I was excited enough to start but not dedicated enough to finish. Over he decades, mostly prior to becoming a fairly prolific writer who actually does finish things, I have collected hundreds of these. They’re sitting there, taking up hard drive space, with creation dates that show me I really wanted to be in this business even in my youngest days.

So when I had to come up with a plot for a thriller novel, I thought, “Why not mine for gold?”

I went to my hard drives, I culled together a collection of story starts, and I began piecing together what would eventually become the Prologue for The Coelho Medallion.

Now, when I look back at that first Dan Kotler book, I can see that I had some pretty solid influences working. Indiana Jones was a given. Archaeologist adventurer and all. 

But at that point in my life I was reading a lot of books that I now realize fell within the thriller genre, though I hadn’t quite thought of them that way originally (for some reason). Among these was Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which led off with the wildly popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Larsson’s obsession with describing 90s-era Apple technology in those books definitely fed into Dan Kotler’s early obsession with things like his iPad and Evernote. I still reference smartphones and apps and smart tablets to this day, but I’ve made them a little less overt, to avoid dating the material too much. 

Other influences included films such as National Treasure, which one reader accused me of plagiarizing (I’m not sure how... nothing in plot of Coelho Medallion is even remotely similar to the plot of those films, and the two characters share only a touch of brilliance tempered with arrogance... maybe that was it?). Then there were books by authors such as Clive Cussler, James Rollins, Steve Berry, and a few others. 

But there were two influences in particular that really shaped Dr. Dan Kotler as a character. The first is a book I wrote about recently, The Fingerprints of the Gods, by Graham Hancock. That book is, as I’ve stated, foundational to the whole Kotler universe. 

But the other influence was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Both the book and the film, and all the subsequent sequels to each, shaped The Coelho Medallion right from the beginning. Though more so than I realized, at the time. 

Kotler is in a very real sense a descendent of Dr. Robert Langdon, from Brown’s books. And in fact, the “Dan” in Dan Kotler’s name is an homage to Dan Brown. Author names are a running in-joke among the characters of these books, and it started from name one. Even the title is an author homage, named for Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist.

All of that I deliberately chose from the beginning. I wanted a character who was brilliant and resourceful, yet flawed and sometimes overstepping. Kotler has many spiritual ancestors, but Robert Langdon is closest.

But it wasn’t until years after publishing The Coelho Medallion that I realized how much actual influence came from The Da Vinci Code.

I was at an author conference, I believe in Las Vegas, and had the television going while I showered and got ready to go back out and take some authors on a drinking tour of the town. When I turned on the TV, Tom Hanks greeted me.

The film, The Da Vinci Code, was playing as part of a marathon. I smiled, having loved the entire series from Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, and I let it play as I got ready.

It started to hit me, after a bit, that the whole thing was a little more familiar than I would have thought. Familiar, but there always seemed to be something missing. Some line I thought I remembered from the film went unsaid. Some scene I thought should have been there simply wasn’t. And then there were lines and scenes that did appear that felt wrong to me. 

It hit me, eventually, what was happening.

When I’d written The Coelho Medallion, I subconsciously reached for characteristics to instill in Dan Kotler so that I could understand his character, and get inside his head. And as I watched The Da Vinci Code for the first time in years, I suddenly started to recognize the framework of characteristics I had unconsciously “borrowed” from the film and the book.

Basically, when I introduce Kotler for the first time, he’s doing his very best impersonation of Robert Langdon.

In fact, once you’re past the Prologue of the book, the first chapter is a fairly decent clone of the introduction of Langdon in the film. It’s not exactly shot-for-shot or anything. No dialogue was lifted. Nothing was plagiarized, strictly speaking. But it’s pretty clear I had that scene in mind as Kotler spoke to a crowded auditorium about the evidence support Vikings in America. 

Kotler was Langdon. Vikings were the works of Leonardo. Dr. Horelica’s abduction was the murder of Sophie’s father. And there are more breadcrumbs like these throughout the book.

It was kind of shocking to me to discover this, but looking back on it I’m not that surprised. I mean, I had never written a book like this before, and I was casting around trying to find a guide. I landed on mimicking the work of an author I knew and enjoyed. It happens.

The rest of the book had different origins, though. I used my thirds to create the prologue, which inevitably inspired the rest of the book’s plot. Really it came down to a scene that is actually no longer in the book (I included it as a bonus at the end of the novel), in which a man on a hike discovers evidence for an underground river that rises to the surface every so often. That scene led me to the idea of the underground river, and from there I had to decide why that would be significant for an archaeologist. 

Another scene involved a museum being robbed, and the artifact was a medallion. I didn’t know what the artifact would point to, per se, but it seemed like a good piece.

Then there was a warehouse being robbed, and thousands of smoke detectors stolen. This was inspired by “The Radioactive Boyscout,” who snagged smoke detectors from an apartment complex that was under construction, and mined them for their radioactive components, in the name of building his very own nuclear reactor. True story. 

I had dozens of pieces like this, things I’d started writing but hadn’t finished. And I picked and chose bits here and there to weave into the Prologue, which inevitably laid the groundwork for the rest of the novel.

In fact, even the prologue was something I borrowed from various inspirations—the opening of The Da Vinci Code was one, but so were the thousands of hours of television series I’ve watched over the years, with their cold opens setting the stage for each episode. Shows like Castle are a good example.

Basically, that first novel was a mishmash of ideas and influences that I somehow, maybe miraculously, pulled together into a book. And that book, despite being a “one-off” in my mind, ended up launching an entire series. Which ended up launching an entire new era for my author career. 

Nick was right, I really did need to write a thriller.

Now, here we are. Kotler has been on hundreds of adventures by this point, and now there are even some new faces in his universe, having adventures of their own. Alex Kayne has a growing presence, along with her AI software, QuIEK. Agent Roland Denzel, Agent Eric Symon, Agent Julia Mayher—all pulling their weight in these novels. Director Liz Ludlum has evolved into someone I never expected. 

The stories, the characters, they are growing. They have become something more than I ever thought I was capable of creating. And it all started with a bit of immigration and mimicry. 

And I am so grateful for every bit of it.

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The first three Dan Kotler Archaeological Thrillers are available NOW on audio from your favorite retailer or library app! Get yours now and start listening in on the action!

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YOU ARE READING SIDE NOTES

Side Notes is an extension of my Notes at the End, which are author’s notes that appear at the end of every one of my novels. If you like these posts, you’ll love the books. 

If you’d like to support me (and see more posts like this) you can do me two favors: First, peruse my catalog of books and find something you’d like to read; and second, join my mailing list to become part of an amazing community of readers and friends I interact with regularly. Thank you for your support!

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I first read Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization in the early 2000’s, after a friend casually mentioned it in conversation. It wasn’t really a book recommendation, at that point. And in fact, I don’t really remember what he said about the book, specifically, that piqued my interest. But he was someone I respected, the book sounded intriguing, and I immediately picked up a copy.

The thing was a tome. About two inches thick, in paperback, and coming in at 592 pages. It was far from being the longest book I’d read up to that point, but it was definitely a chunk of book that felt wonderful to hold in my hand. I do almost all of my reading via ebooks these days, but I’ve always been a sucker for a good, solid book.

I’ve also always loved history, though I did go through a period where I apparently denied this, first to myself and then, by extension and attitude, to others. It wasn’t cool, after all. I had enough trouble getting along with people in school, especially high school, without throwing “he’s the guy who nerds out about history” into the mix. 

Actually, it wasn’t even strictly history I nerded out over. It was weird and unusual history.

I loved reading and watching things about ancient Egypt, for example, but mostly it was the stuff about lost tombs and treasures, mystic objects and mythic beings, powerful gods and sorcerers that really got my brain buzzing. The hint of mystery among the ancient was always the most intriguing part to me. Reading a laundry list of lineage between dynasties was never quite as appealing, and neither was memorizing when Person X read Speech Y at Location and Event Z.

A plea to history teachers: Please stop teaching history as if it’s just one big census, and start focusing on the inspiring and fun parts. Love, people who love history. 

Fingerprints of the Gods hit all the right notes for me, right from page one. And though it was not the first book about “weird and unusual history” I’d ever read, it was still the start of a new era in reading and research and thought for me. It became a foundational book for my experience with and slog through history and archaeological study, and even more so for my career as a novelist. 

You can see the influence of this book (as well as other books by Hancock and his peers) in my Dan Kotler Archaeological Thrillers. Kotler is, in essence, an homage to guys like Hancock—an archaeologist who skirts the edge of the accepted narrative of history, who finds himself continuously at odds with the institutions of science and academia, challenging their self-assured positions with new facts that they’d prefer to ignore. Kotler gets compared to other famous fictional archaeologists and historians—notably the likes of Indiana Jones and Dr. Robert Langdon (of Da Vinci Code fame), and even Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt, at times—but at his core is an echo of Graham Hancock.

The thing that intrigues me most about Fingerprints is the concept of comparative mythology. It’s a theme I’ve come back to hundreds of times in my novels, and to me it’s perhaps the key to understanding more about human culture and history, shedding a very different light on our origins than what has so far been our story. 

Comparative mythology is, in a nutshell, the notion that hidden among all of the various and disparate cultures of the world are threads of a common story, and hints of a civilization lost to the mists of time. As just one example, when you look into every single myth and religion in recorded history, there is a flood myth. And that flood myth invariably contains common elements, even between cultures that should have absolutely nothing in common. There is always a man who communes with a greater power (God, or gods, or spirits, or some other powerful entity). This figure is told in advance of the coming of a great flood, and given explicit instructions for what to do so he and his family will survive. And in following those instructions they all do survive, to go forth and repopulate the Earth.

It’s mind boggling how similar the stories are. It shows up everywhere.

Call me on this. Go look at myths from the Mayans and Aztecs, compare them to myths from the Christian story, and then to myths from ancient Egypt, the Mesopotamian, the Phoenicians. And then, just for fun, look for flood myths among the Celts and Vikings. 

Water, water everywhere.

The same thing happens with other myths and legends, including the presence of “great trees” in just about every religion in existence, and the story of a savior who dies, only to be resurrected and raised to the heavens. Read the story of Osiris, and compare him to Christ, and then for some real fun go look at the story of Viracocha—the bearded, white-skinned god worshiped by the pre-Inca in Peru, who was known for traveling the land with his disciples, teaching about doing good while healing the sick, and even walking on water.

Mind = Blown.

Fingerprints looks at all of the above, by the way, and has served me as a very stable foundation for exploring things like this at a much deeper level. 

In this book I first learned of the alignment of the pyramids at Giza to the stars in the belt of Orion. I further learned that the same sort of alignment is in evidence at the Mayan pyramids. I learned about the prolific presence of circular cycles of destruction and resurrection in all the ancient cultures, a speculation about the continual death and rebirth of humanity. I learned that there are human cultures of which we know practically nothing, beyond the whispers we’ve deciphered from time-worn stone and ancient artifacts. All of these things, in one form or another, have made it into my books. And all of them hint at a world before the world we know, more ancient than we ever imagined.

“Stuff just keeps getting older,” as Graham Hancock himself is fond of saying. And he’s right. 

If you’ve read and enjoyed my Dan Kotler thrillers, and have an interest in the type of “weird and usual history” that Kotler is now famous for exploring, I recommend reading Fingerprints of the Gods, and the other books that have sprung from Hancock’s pen. You’ll come away with a new perspective on history and humanity, and it will change you forever.

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YOU ARE READING SIDE NOTES

Side Notes is an extension of my Notes at the End, which are author’s notes that appear at the end of every one of my novels. If you like these posts, you’ll love the books. 

If you’d like to support me (and see more posts like this) you can do me two favors: First, peruse my catalog of books and find something you’d like to read; and second, join my mailing list to become part of an amazing community of readers and friends I interact with regularly. Thank you for your support!

Dark roast. “A smoky and creamy blend with notes of dark chocolate and caramel.”

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For the first time ever, it’s “What’s in My Cup!” A look at one of the coffees Kara and I are trying while we galavant around the country for the whole #vanlife. This, by the way, is something Kara and I have started doing as a hobby under the heading Kara & Kevin’s Koffee Knotes. I have no idea where it’ll go from here, but let’s have some fun.

The latest brew is from Groundwork, called Bitches Brew, and is a dark roast labeled as their “Signature Blend.”

From the label: A smoky and creamy blend with notes of dark chocolate and caramel.

And from the back of the package:

Established in 1990, Groundwork was one of the first certified organic coffee rosters in Southern California. A pioneer in organic, Fair Trade, and fairly traded coffee sourcing, we have long been committed to sustainable business practices, forging relationships with growers and importers who promote responsible coffee production.

Groundwork proudly specializes in peak-roasted, single origin coffees and robust, flavorful blends. Our mission is to developer each coffee to its maximum potential while meeting the demands of our dynamic customer base in a sustainable way. From field to cup, we provide the highest quality coffee available while continuing our work to improve hte well-being of our communities, both locally and at origin.

Kevin’s Knotes:

Slightly acidic, and I do pick up light notes of chocolate. Flavor lingers forward on my tongue. The sip is strong and full-bodied, but the aftertaste fades until only the notes and the slight acid linger. I give it 3 out of 5 Ks. 

Kara’s Knotes:

My first sip was strong and had a bite to it. There is a slight aftertaste that has the flavor I call “like an ashtray”. Only slightly, but it is there. I also give it a 3 out of 5 Ks.

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“Isn’t it kind of cramped in the van?”

When Kara and I first started this whole RV-lifestyle journey, the first thing we did was sell our four-bedroom, 2,800 square foot house and downsize to a one-bedroom 940  square foot apartment. We lived there for almost two years as we figured out the best next step. Eventually we bought a 38-foot motor coach that was just under 300 square feet.

Getting tighter.

And yet, somehow, that motorhome ended up feeling more spacious than the apartment did. Sure, there was some shuffle—we, like a lot of people who go full-time into an RV—made the mistake of trying to transfer our whole lives into the rig. We tried to replicate our house in there, which meant we had too much stuff. And too much stuff meant we were living around our space instead of living in it. 

Over time, we came off the road and got another apartment. This time it was a vast, luxurious two bedroom with about 1,500 square feet. Room to stretch!

About two years after that we decided to move yet again, and this time relocated to an apartment that was referred to as a “flat” in their brochure, which amounted to about 2,400 square feet of townhome living, complete with three bedrooms and a garage. Massive. 

Enter the goldfish principle—you and your stuff tend to expand to fill the space you occupy. And we did. We pulled everything we had out of storage and filled that flat, really settling in and occupying the space. It was comfortable, and we enjoyed it.

We were house hunting when the idea of getting back on the road occurred to us.

We had put a bid in on a house, and we were approved on a loan, and then they came back asking for a bigger down payment. We felt pretty strongly that we could come up with that, if we needed to. Or I could probably have worked some writerly magic and convinced them to stick to the original deal. 

Instead, it got us thinking.

Why were we trying to buy that house in the first place? Did we need more space? No, we decided. It was about ownership, having property. We wanted something that would gain value over time. An investment. 

So... why there? 

If the idea was to be strategic about buying property, about making an investment, why buy in that neighborhood? Why buy in that area? Property values (at the time) were pretty stable. Any appreciation would be fairly minimal. And in the meantime we’d own a place in an area we were constantly road tripping to get away from.

So why not just get on the road again?

Ok, that was part A. And it was enough to get us excited about the idea. 

But part B was all about downsizing.

Kara was always the more nervous one, of the two of us, when it came to living in a smaller space. She likes to spread out, to cook big meals in a well-appointed kitchen, to have plenty of space for projects and creating. I tend to work from a desk. I like to have a space that’s all me, but it can be fairly small and I’d be fine. In fact, in each of the massive home spaces we ever lived in, my office was where I spent the most time, and it was typically one of the smaller rooms in the house. 

But Kara surprised me when we started talking about getting back on the road. She was the one who suggested we put everything into storage and downsize to something tiny. 

We ended up buying a 24-foot camper that was, maybe on the high side, about 180 square foot of living space. Our smallest home yet.

Again, we took too much stuff with us. But at least this time we had the additional of the back of a pickup to cram some things into, so the living space itself was relatively open. And for a few months, we lived in it just fine. We each had our seats at the table, where we could work. We had a cramped little kitchen, but it was enough for Kara to do some cooking. It just turned out that cooking on the road wasn’t really something we cared to do that often. More on that later. 

We were comfortable in the camper. But there was a downside we could never have predicted. 

We had planned all this, bought the camper, moved our stuff into storage, and terminated the lease on our massive townhome, all in the first couple of months of 2020.

Remember 2020?

In fact, the last day of our lease was April 1st. And it was on that day that the whole world suddenly went into lockdown over COVID-19.

I won’t kid ya... we panicked a little. 

Because here we were, effectively homeless, at a time when traveling was sort of frowned upon. Campgrounds we’d planned to visit were shut down. Restaurants and cafes we’d planned to work from were turning people away. Stores we planned to shop in were limiting the number of people who could come in per day, and their shelves were stripped bare. 

We couldn’t find public restrooms. We couldn’t get groceries. We couldn’t find places to park. 

Thank God for Kara’s folks. As much as we hated to impose on them, we really had no other place to go. So we managed to get a storage space for the camper, we grabbed our stuff, and we moved into a single bedroom of their house, about 100 square feet.

We stayed there for two months before things started calming down out in the world. It was still hard to find public restrooms, and you still couldn’t go into restaurants, per se. But things were beginning to open up just enough. And we got on the road again.

We didn’t get far. We stuck to Texas for the first few months. And living in the camper was just fine. Small space, yes. But we were learning how to live in that space.

So one unexpected downside to the camper, though, did come up.

We were parked in a pretty amazing campground in Kerrville, Texas, which is a couple of hours in all directions for anything you might want to do or see. Shopping, dining, activities... all of those things were a trek. And since public restrooms were still kind of hard to come by, and only a few businesses were opening up in reasonable ways, we found we were a little screwed if we were more than an hour or two from the camper. We’d have to ditch and drive back, just to use the restroom or have a meal.

That was when Kara asked, “What if we traded the truck and camper and downsized to a van?”

Downsize. Again.

We were already living in a space smaller than the bathroom we’d had at our last apartment, but sure... downsize. Again.

We were driving back to “home,” to her parents’ place, when we stopped at an RV dealer and took a look at what would ultimately become our new mobile residence. It took some negotiating and some haggling and some dealing, but eventually we managed to swing it. We traded our brand new F-150 and brand new Lance camper trailer and got a brand new Coachmen Beyond conversion van. About 70 square feet.

Downsizing to that space meant getting real. We knew we couldn’t take all of it with us. Not even half of it. Not even a third of it. 

So for about a month we went back and forth from our storage units (plural), loading and unloading, trying and discarding, figuring out what we really needed, what we could get by with, and what had to stay. 

In a lot of ways, even after a year of living in the van and traveling the US, we’re still trying to figure it out. 

I think we’ve gotten to a fairly good place with it, but we still, occasionally, have to reassess. I have a backpack full of production gear, for example, that I’ve barely used. A backpack. And I’m still considering taking out only the things I’ve used and putting the rest in storage, the next time we pass through. The same goes for some of my clothes, some of my tools, and a few other odds and ends. 

You’d be amazed at how little it takes to get by, out here. Living in 70 square feet wakes you up to the fact that all the living space is outside.

And cooking...

Well, we don’t want to eat out all the time. But cooking in the van is a very challenging event. We do have an induction cooktop, and we have pans and pots and utensils. We have a tiny little fridge, though, that can’t hold much more than a meal at a time. So the cooktop ends up being our coffee maker (we heat up water in a kettle and use French presses). 

We do have a microwave, but we don’t use it much. Most of our food is lighter fare, things we can eat straight from the fridge or the pantry, supplemented by the occasional pick-up meal. We avoid fast food, so a lot of those meals come from Whole Foods and grocery stores, and sometimes restaurants.

I’ve taken to cooking on a camp stove, though, which is fun. We do that maybe three times per week, and we typically pick up whatever we’re cooking the day we’re going to make it. 

We aren’t starving.

So living in 70 square feet, we get a lot of comments and questions. “Isn’t it kind of cramped in the van?”

Yes and no.

We’ve learned how to live in this space. We’ve even learned how to be “apart” in the space. Kara tends to work from her bed, where she can set up like a sofa. I tend to work from the passenger seat, which turns around and allows me to kick my feet up on a camp stool and use my lap desk. It works. It’s enough.

But the real breakthrough is that point about all the space being outside.

We don’t feel cramped in the van, because the van takes us to places that are expansive, wide open, vast. I work outside sometimes. We take walks and hikes. We visit historic sites and tour monuments. Things have started opening up out here, so we even go to those cafes and restaurants and coffee shops we were missing.

It’s pretty amazing, how much space you can get out of 70 square feet.

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YOU ARE READING SIDE NOTES

Side Notes is an extension of my Notes at the End, which are author’s notes that appear at the end of every one of my novels. If you like these posts, you’ll love the books. 

If you’d like to support me (and see more posts like this) you can do me two favors: First, peruse my catalog of books and find something you’d like to read; and second, join my mailing list to become part of an amazing community of readers and friends I interact with regularly. Thank you for your support!

Journaling is such an important part of my life. 

I think I’ve always instinctively believed this, but like most good things, good habits of my life, I dragged my feet over it.

Like writing itself—I spent so many years dabbling instead of diving in. How many novels or short stories or articles could have been written in the gaps I left in my years? Though I have journaled practically all my life, I haven’t consistently journaled all that time. 

Still, the few entries I wrote when I was a kid are a delight to read. Going back through them every now and then reminds me of who I was, what I was hung up on, what I wanted to change. 

It’s funny, but a lot of my journal entries show that I’ve faced the same personal challenges forever. I don’t know if that means I’m a slow learner, or if these are flaws in my personal character, or what, exactly. I just know that there are themes that have carried through in my life, from page to page, year after year.

The key, then—I say this thinking maybe this is something I’ve ignored—the key is to look back, reflect on these journal entries, find those common themes, then commit to doing something about them.

For example, stress and anxiety are something I’ve written about at length over the past several years. I have at least five years of entries in my Day One journal that reflect on anxiety, and what a challenge it has been in my life. And what I notice, as I look back, is that my strategy for dealing with that anxiety is always pretty much the same.

And obviously it hasn’t been working.

There is that pesky definition of insanity floating around, that it is “doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.” My strategy for managing my anxiety is, in fact, insanity. I keep doing the same stuff, and I keep doing the same result.

If you always put a cup of salt in our cookies, they’re always going to taste bad, no matter how carefully you kneed the dough or how many chocolate chips you add. Doing one thing better, adding something good, isn’t enough. Take the salt out.

That brings me to an important part of journaling—review.

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Ryan Holiday, author and stoic philosopher, points out that journaling daily is an opportunity to review your day so that you can decide what went right, what went wrong, and what you can do better tomorrow. I think looking back at past journal entries is about the same thing.

Look back, review what you’ve written, and you can find the trends and the repeated occurrences. And when you see them, you can strategize around them. You can see what works and what doesn’t, and you can plan to do something different for once.

A lesson I apparently am still learning.

But it all starts with taking the time to keep a journal, and with doing that consistently.

When I’m talking to other authors about writing and editing, I like using the metaphor of a sculptor working with marble: You can’t carve David if you don’t have the block of marble to work with. 

In that metaphor, I’m telling writers to focus on their rough draft first, without worrying about editing, and then come back and chip away any errors or mistakes or rough language during editing. But the point is you can’t edit what you haven’t written.

And you can’t review journal entires if you haven’t written any down, either.

Journaling isn’t easy. It’s a discipline. But it’s one that has so many perks and benefits, it would be crazy to avoid it. 

You don’t have to overthink it. What you write doesn’t have to be glowing prose. It doesn’t even have to be spelled properly. Free write. Put thoughts down. Ignore the mistakes, ignore everything your fifth grade English teacher taught you. Just put down your thoughts, your fears, your joys, your worries—everything that is you goes on the page. 

Looping back to Ryan Holiday, this video was a great list of tips for “journaling like a pro”: https://youtu.be/ZVeUIclaMTE

My own tips are a bit more mundane. 

I use Day One, an app that is available on desktop computers, smartphones, and smart tablets, and that syncs with the cloud. I have dozens of journals in that app. And I use tagging for each entire, extensively, so I can sort back through and find common themes. The app does something wonderful—it shows you all the entries for a given day, going back to the earliest days of your journaling. I couldn’t possibly recommend this app high enough, it’s a vital part of my daily habits.

I also use Moleskine notebooks. My personal preference is for the little 3x5 gridded notebooks. I number the top corners of each page, and I start each day with the date, the time, the temperature, and the location I’m writing from. I also start each entire with “3 pieces of wisdom,” which are thoughts I have or quotes I’ve heard that feel wise to me, feel like good advice I should follow. And then I fill the entire page with raw thought, unedited and unplanned, until I come to the end. I write about anything and everything. It would be a very boring read for anyone but me, and sometimes even me.

I currently keep two Moleskines, actually. The one I described above is my “reflections” journal. Then there’s another one that I think of as my “planning” journal. In this one I write down my 5 Critical Tasks for the day, and I strike through each task as it’s created. I also do little thumbnail sketches in this journal, jot down quotes, jot down things I want to remember or tasks I want to add to my schedule. I make notes about book or business ideas. It’s a dumping ground, and I love it. It’s the most unorganized writing I do, and I love it.

The point is, journaling is the chisel and hammer I use to chip away the rough edges of myself, so I can shape myself in new and beautiful ways. Over the years, the specific practice for my journals has shifted and evolved. I change things up from time to time. I add this or subtract that. But I have come to recognize with absolute certainty that journaling is the key to my personal growth. 

Journaling is how I tell myself who I am, and who I can become.

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YOU ARE READING SIDE NOTES

Side Notes is an extension of my Notes at the End, which are author’s notes that appear at the end of every one of my novels. If you like these posts, you’ll love the books. 

If you’d like to support me (and see more posts like this) you can do me two favors: First, peruse my catalog of books and find something you’d like to read; and second, join my mailing list to become part of an amazing community of readers and friends I interact with regularly. Thank you for your support!

I was jotting something about this in the Moleskine this morning, and I wanted to record it here:

• Our sense of the pace of time is a function of our emotions.

• Emotional discipline is the key to changing your personal reality.

• Control your emotions and you are free.

I’ve been reading Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, and this morning’s chapter (Law 35: Master the Art of Timing) gave me further insight into our perception of time, and the relationship between the pace of time, in our experience, and our emotional state. 

This is why we tend to be impatient when we are young, and tend to have more patience as we mature. Maturity is essentially another term for emotional discipline.

I’m finding that emotion turns out to be the key to practically everything. If we are emotionally disciplined, we are in control of our response to external events. Which means we control how we perceive reality and how we behave. Controlling emotion empowers us.

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Controlling emotion is a foundational principle across a variety of disciplines and philosophies and spiritual practices. Christ told us to control our emotions (“fear not,” “worry for nothing”). Stoicism tells us to be emotionally disciplined. Even practitioners of the Law of Attraction tell us that our emotions are the key to knowing what we are thinking, and that controlling our emotions (experiencing joy instead of fear or worry) allows us to manifest what we want. 

I think all of this is true. And it isn’t magic.

Emotional discipline does influence our perception of time. If we are emotionally disciplined, time will seem to slow down for us, which means we have more of a chance of discovering opportunities and resources we might have overlooked. Slowing time, even if it’s just in our perception of it, give us more space to think.

Emotional discipline makes us more diplomatic as well. Our reaction to others, and to the events that occur in our lives, is tempered by our emotional maturity. If we are emotionally disciplined, we control our response. We choose how we respond, rather than reacting by default. And default reaction is the fastest way to start making mistakes and building up regrets. 

Our emotions really do signal what we are thinking—whether our thoughts are serving us or working against us. If we are thinking negative thoughts, we’ll feel bad. If we are thinking positive thoughts, we’ll feel good. No matter where you stand on the topic of things like “law of attraction,” you have to realize that feeling bad means your chances of making bad decision will increase, and feeling good means you’ll increase the chances of good decisions. 

Think about diet and exercise. If you dread going to the gym, if you have a visceral reaction to eating leafy greens, if the idea of drinking water turns your stomach, you won’t do those things. 

On the other hand, if you can get yourself excited about going to the gym, listening to some energizing music or using the time to listen to audiobooks, you’ll improve your chances of going. If you can get yourself to enjoy the texture and taste of leafy greens, you’ll eat them more often. If you learn to appreciate good, pure, filtered water, maybe on a hot day or after a workout, you’ll come to crave it and drink more of it. 

All of these outcomes are a result of your emotional state. You can see that, right?

Once you realize the role that emotion plays in every aspect of your life, you start seeing that emotional discipline is self discipline. And self discipline is freedom.

Control your emotions and you will shape your life into what you want it to be.

 Let your emotions control you, and you get whatever you get.

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YOU ARE READING SIDE NOTES

Side Notes is an extension of my Notes at the End, which are author’s notes that appear at the end of every one of my novels. If you like these posts, you’ll love the books. 

If you’d like to support me (and see more posts like this) you can do me two favors: First, peruse my catalog of books and find something you’d like to read; and second, join my mailing list to become part of an amazing community of readers and friends I interact with regularly. Thank you for your support!

Traveling—especially the whole #vanlife version of traveling—does a lot to inspire me. Over the past two months along we’ve seen all kinds of interesting sights and explored all sorts if locations. I’ve been to ancient and mysterious structures, fabulous seaside mansions, and haunting historical sites. And technically I never left my home, since we were in the van the whole time. There’s something kind of awesome about exploring the world while having your own personal bathroom at hand.

One of the locations we visited a short time back is known as “the Viking Tower,” located in Newport, Rhode Island.

In my first Dan Kotler book, The Coelho Medallion, the Viking Tower got a very brief mention. It was one of several sites in the US that Kotler called out as potential evidence for the presence of Vikings in America. The structure is pretty ancient by American terms, standing in what is now a small and well-manicured public park near the coast.

I had heard about this structure years ago, and in that time I’ve read and watched a lot about it. There’s some controversy around its origins and even its age. At present, the consensus seems to be that it is actually an old windmill, presumably built in the 17th century.

You can learn more about it from this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_Tower_(Rhode_Island)

And my buddy and fellow thriller author, Nick Thacker, and I talked about the structure a bit on an upcoming episode of our podcast, Stuff That’s Real, That You Didn’t Know was Real, But Also Is Cool (we’ll let you off the hook, and you call it Stuff That’s Real Podcast for short). You can find the podcast and watch for that upcoming episode here: http://stuffthatsreal.com

I love topics like this one. The mystery. The history. The questions. Even the answers are intriguing, mostly because you can sense and see that there are those who are willing to ignore one set of facts in favor of another, all in the name of putting the questions to rest. That’s just good science, right there. It’s at least good thriller novel fodder.

Because whatever the real origin and history of the Viking Towner (or the Newport Tower, or the Old Stone Mill) might be, the fact that there is a haze of uncertainty and questions around it means its wide open for some novelist conjecture and what-if.

I mean… what if it really is a structure built by Vikings, in some pre-Columbian era of North America? What does that suggest about our history, both known and unknown?

Or what if it turns out that this really was an old mill, built by American settlers… what happened to them? Where did they go? Was this a Roanoke scenario, where a whole village of early settlers just vanished from the Earth? And if so, who was responsible, and why?

Why aren’t there any other structures dated to around the time of the Old Mill?

Why haven’t they found evidence of timbers or implements that would be associated with the mill?

What if their carbon dating of the mortar between stones was thrown off by environmental factors?

So… many… questions.

And where there are questions, there are stories.

My job, as a novelist, is to mine questions and mysteries for the story I can craft for my audience. And if I were to choose to write about the Viking Tower, I can already think of a half-dozen directions to take those stories. Dan Kotler would surely be intrigued, and so would I. And so, hopefully, would my readers.

If you happen to be one of those readers, my hope is you’re seeing a bit of the behind-the-scenes that goes into my thriller novels. This is how it happens. I stumble across something while traveling or doing research, I have questions, I go looking for answers, and when I don’t find any I start making some up. Because being a storyteller, I’m compelled to come up with some explanation for this mystery, and if I can’t find it in the real world then the only way to scratch that itch is to invent it.

I think the same is true for readers. It’s why I read thrillers and mysteries and books with intriguing questions at their heart, anyway. If an author presents me with an intriguing enough question, I’ll read to find the answer. It’s a satisfying symbiotic relationship.

For any authors who may have stumbled across this post, here’s the lesson at its heart: Your job, as the storyteller, is to pose the right question. If you ask the right question, then readers will buy and read your book to find the answer. So the more intriguing and nuanced the question, the better your chances of a sale.

The really good books, movies, television shows, and video games we consume have this at their core. It’s all about asking a question that gets the reader or viewer or player excited, and then delivering a satisfying answer to that question.

So, if you’re a writer, spend a little time tinkering and refining your question. See if you can boil it down to a line or two. That can be labeled as “your premise.”

If you’re a reader, then you’re already doing your part in the novel writing process. Chances are that if the question asked by the book isn’t good enough, you won’t bother picking it up. And if the answer the author gives you isn’t good enough, you’ll leave a bad review.

Such is the cycle of life.

Questions and answers.

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Say hello using the Contact menu above, and God bless you with health, happiness, and happy reading.

I’ve been doing something new for the past month. It started because I watched this video from Peter McKinnon, who saw an Instagram post from John Grimsmo, who probably got it from a book on habits and/or productivity (my money’s on Atomic Habits, by James Clear). So you can see the line of progression can get pretty long for this sort of thing, but the fact is a good idea is a good idea, no matter how long it takes to get to you.

And this idea is pretty simple: Use a journal to write down your critical tasks every day.

Simple, yes. But I’ll confess, for years this idea was something I balked at. And it’s probably down to me not being big on “commitments.” Typical, right? But the thought of scheduling every minute of my day, instead of being able to freeform through it, always bothered me.

Of course, freeforming your way through every day has its downsides, too. For a start, if you don’t have any sort of schedule or plan, then you day tends to get soaked up by unimportant tasks. And for some people (I’m definitely one of these), when your day is filled with the unimportant, and you can see that there are important tasks piling up, well that just creates stress. It creates that feeling of “overwhelm.” It creates anxiety.

I’ve suffered from anxiety for the past few years. It’s relatively new in my life, but it’s definitely there. It started when I was in a job that I was… ok, I admit it, I was blowing this gig off. I was reporting in, doing the bare minimum, and taking home a paycheck. I was… (God I hate admitting this)… a slacker.

Oy.

I, the person who prides himself on his work ethic, who does everything possible to keep all the plates spinning, and even pick up the broken plates that drop and glue them back together so he can start spinning them again—I was slacking off.

It’s so humiliating.

But it’s worse than that. While I was screwing around and collecting a check for basically nothing, I started to feel something. It took awhile to realize what that something was, but when it hit me it hit me hard.

I felt guilty.

I have traced my anxiety back to that exact moment in time, and I realize that unequivocally that is the beginning, the start, the apex of it all. Before that time in my life I may have felt the occasional dread and the momentary panic of anxiety, but it was fleeting. It passed, leaving me to live a more or less even and unfettered life. But then, suddenly, things changed. I went from being blasé about everything to being genuinely and horrifically worried about it all. I worried about my income, my workload, my reputation, my future. All of it. All of the time.

That was also, I believe, the moment when I realized that I had to have a strong work ethic. That I could not cheat those who were paying me for my work. Not without consequences.

I live with those consequences even now. And they manifest in freakish, weird ways.

For a start, that guilt I felt? I feel it all the time now. When I’m not working on something. When I am working on something. When I’m working on something and I should probably be working on something else. When I’m working on the task I’m supposed to be doing.

Paid work or unpaid work. Professional work or personal work. During working ours or during free time. Guilt. Always guilt. Always anxiety.

I’m experimenting and testing and trying things, in an attempt to overcome that. And part of the process is figuring out exactly what triggers the feeling, so I can work out how to mitigate or eliminate it.

There’s a lot to explore there, and I don’t have time to do all of it in this one post. But what I can tell you is that part of the issue for me is basically “scope creep.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it essentially means that you can get overloaded by essential tasks, to the point of paralyzing your efforts altogether. In other words, when you have a project or task to complete, the sub tasks sometimes get so numerous and weighty that they derail you, and you finish nothing. Or, in my case, you feel guilty even as you somehow manage to get everything done.

You end up regretting and feeling anxious about the things you didn’t do, even if the list of to-dos is unwieldy and unreasonable.

Maybe you can relate.

As an author, task creep is a huge part of my daily life. Because frankly, there are just more things I could be doing to push my career forward, and a lot of them start to feel like things I should be doing.

The same is true for my role as Director of Marketing for Draft2Digital. I have lists and lists of things that we could and should be doing as a brand, and almost all of them require a ton of time to develop and implement. Everything from recording live streams to editing podcasts to recording and editing videos to writing blog posts to writing books on behalf of the company to writing emails and social media posts to doing interviews to organizing and planning and attending and speaking at conferences… GAHHHH!

But hey, that’s life, right? Every day is the firehose. There will always be more to do.

Open wide.

So having anxiety about all of it makes everything that much more challenging. And since I can’t really control the volume of work I have on my plate, I have to look at ways to at least tamp down that anxiety over it. One of those ways is to prioritize, and put “first things first.”

This isn’t a new idea. In fact, I first encountered it in the same place most people do, which was Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s actually Habit 3 in that book. A classic.

There are a lot of ways to put that habit into practice, including using Covey’s tips for a “priority matrix.” They’re tried and true, and they work. But I’ve always been fond of lists. So lists tend to be the best approach for me (to be fair, I haven’t giving the whole matrix thing a fair shake yet—maybe I’ll try that out and report back).

So the thing I like about making a Critical Task list is that it can be a mix of the different silos of my life. I can have tasks that are centered on Draft2Digital, on my writing career, and on my personal life, and they each get their own priority. I like that. I also like that I get to use a journal for the process. I’m a big fan of journals, and I’ve secretly felt like I never use them properly. Another one of those weird hangups I have.

When I watched Peter’s video on this, he seemed to resonate with the whole journal idea, too. And he gave some reasons why he feels it’s better to put these lists down on actual paper with an actual writing implement, rather than use something digital like the Reminders app on your phone.

For a start, writing things down by hand does something different in your brain than tapping it onto the screen of your phone. It engages a different set of skills. And research shows that physically writing something down often makes the memory of it more “sticky.”

It also takes you out of your usual environment. Chances are you spend a fair amount of time staring at screens. I know I do. So being able to write something by hand makes it novel and unique. It makes it special.

I keep a bunch of Moleskine notebooks around. I have for years. I’ve kept them as daily journals for a very long time. Even when I fall out of the habit, I always eventually come back and pick up where I left off. These days journaling is one of my “first tasks.” I do it first thing in the morning, to start my day, and I feel out of sorts when I don’t make the time.

One of the Moleskines I’ve carried with me since the beginning of the year is a little “special.” It’s not meant to be a journal, per se. It’s more of an inbox for ideas, a place to sketch something I see in the world, a page I can fill with quotes or slogans I want to put on T-shirts, that kind of thing. I found that I wasn’t quite using it as much as I’d anticipated, though. So when this idea of jotting down critical tasks came along, I repurposed that notebook… slightly.

Here’s where things get interesting (for me, at least… your mileage may vary!).

Taking Peter and John’s advice, I started jotting down my critical tasks for each day. I made this 5 Critical Tasks—thinking that would make for a reasonable number of things that I absolutely must accomplish with my day. Five tasks, and they’re a mix of author, D2D, and personal priorities.

One thing I’ve done for years—and it’s something I utterly rely on—is put tasks on my calendar. “If it isn’t on the calendar, it doesn’t exist.” That’s always been my motto. And it works very well. I put everything on the calendar, and everything ends up getting done.

It just doesn’t always get done on the specific day where I put it.

Remember when we talked about task creep? This is where that starts. I go through my week with a flurry of tasks swarming into my brain, and to keep myself from losing any of them I drop them on the calendar. I try to pick the days I think I’d be most likely to be able to get them done, but more often than not I just end up having to move them to a different day. Which means they aren’t done that day. Which means (you guessed it) I feel guilty for not doing my work.

[Anxity arises. Lingers. Buys lawn chairs. Starts thinking about painting the walls.]

That has always bothered me, but if you really stop to think about it, what’s actually wrong with that approach? If I put something on the calendar for Tuesday, but Tuesday happens to get very busy, or one of my tasks happens to take longer than anticipated, what’s actually wrong with moving that task to Wednesday? And in fact, if Wednesday is already full, what’s actually wrong with moving the task to Thursday instead?

The answer is “nothing is actually wrong with it.” But that’s why anxiety is such an ordeal. Because logic has nothing to do with it.

I can reason that I’m doing the right thing, and doing nothing wrong. I can agree to it. But something, somewhere inside of me, isn’t having it. Some part of me still thinks I’m screwing off. WORK HARDER, TUMLINSON.

You starting to see how I write a half dozen books each year? As a boss, I’m a slave driver.

So though the calendar thing really makes my life possible, it’s missing a little something. And now I know, that something is my 5 Critical Tasks.

I won’t say that I don’t still get tinges of anxiety. I do. It plagues me. I’m learning ways to deal with it. But when I write down those five tasks, and then strike them off throughout the day, it just does something. It clears my cache, in a way. It makes me feel like I’m making progress. And in fact, I can look at the list and see that, yes, I did knock some things off. Big things. Important things.

So what about those days when I don’t actually have five critical tasks?

They happen. Sometimes it’s because I know that one particular task is going to take a huge chunk of time. I know that things are going to be a little skewed. Or I know that I’m maybe a little burnt out, and need to recover (this happens when I do conference stuff, or do a lot of virtual events).

On those days I may only put a couple of work tasks. Things that are important, that will move my career and life forward, for sure. But I maybe put fewer things on the day than I would have otherwise. And I put in some critical tasks that I sometimes forget to think about.

For example, for today, not only do I have “Write a blog post” on my critical tasks, I also have “Relax and enjoy yourself.”

That’s because we’re currently in a campground in Massachusetts, surrounded by families and activities. It’s been a long week, and I’ve gotten a lot done. I’ve been productive and efficient. And now, I need some wind-down time.

So this afternoon, once I’ve struck all four other tasks off of the list, I’ll close my iPad, take a walk, chat with the neighbors, and spend the rest of the day and evening letting everything fade into the background.

Because sometimes it’s important to make personal care the first thing.

So does this list help?

I’ve been using it for 30 days straight now. Out of those 30 days, there was only twice that I didn’t get to everything on my list. But that said—yes. Absolutely. The list helps.

I transfer things from my calendar onto that list, and since I limit myself to five tasks that means I can’t overload my day. I have to move those extra tasks to later. So that helps me to think through my list and to prioritize.

I also have a record of when I did things. I know I struck Task X off on July 23rd. DONE. Now I can move on, my bandwidth freed up, my soul feeling a little less crushed from the weight of all the To-Dos.

It works. It works for me, anyway. The combination of my calendar and this list is a good one. It helps me create more time while still getting everything done.

I’m continuing to experiment and to see if I can refine this, add some new things, take some things away. But I’m pretty happy with my results so far.

If you try this and like the process, be sure to let me know in the comments below!

Until then, good health and God bless.

I was raised by my grandparents—a household in which the influence of the Great Depression still echoed. Through work, diligence, common sense, and industriousness, my family developed a form of wealth, but you might not recognize it.

My family owned land, even owned livestock, in the earliest part of my life. We lived on land that provided for the bulk of our needs—well water and vegetable gardens, rows of corn, milk and meat, eggs. We went grocery shopping for the "fancy stuff."

As I got closer to adulthood, really in my early teen years, this wealth started to dwindle. Though my grandparents were married until death did them part, a couple of family divorces—paired with some infidelities and at least one somewhat impressive financial crime—started tearing things down.

This sort-of-wealth my grandparents had built over a lifetime started bleeding away, in the form of bits of land having to be sold, and money saved having to save some troubled family souls.

These were not bitter losses. These were willing sacrifices. And if they hurt my grandparents on some level, I never knew it. That’s part of the wealth. They did these things, and young Kevin never had to know about the pain of it.

We still had a home, and land, and we didn't go hungry. Life was still good.

Poverty came later. And mostly just for me. And it was all my own doing.

Going my own way

Like the Prodigal Son, I left home, embarking on my own path, willful and stubborn and entitled.

What came for me was a famine. Years of poverty so profound, it shocked and confused me. It didn’t come all at once, but when it came it was like a sudden storm. I had lived in a shelter all my life, and had no idea such a storm could even exist. I was not prepared.

I couldn't afford food. I really couldn't afford shelter. I was continuing my existence by taking out more and more debt, mostly in the form of credit cards and student loans.

Both of these were so easy for someone like me to get—a freshly graduated high school student with no credit history, no job, and just over a thousand dollars in savings. Hitching me to lifelong debt was as simple as signing some papers and taking my free baseball cap.

The credit card companies are predatory and evil bastards, but they can’t hold a candle to the institution of student loans.

I'd been sold on the idea that education was the most important thing in life, but I’d been fooled about what education really meant.

College logic

I'd let the world convince me that college was the only path to success. That going to college was the only way to be anything in the world. And I’d fallen for the lie that this kind of education was worth any sacrifice, any amount of debt. Nothing was more important than university.

And a private university—that would mean even more, even better opportunities. That huge price tag for the exact same equation you could get for a third of the cost elsewhere… so worth it. Paying more means getting better quality, I believed. Actually, though that never appeared in writing anywhere, and though the financial advisors of my private university would deny ever even implying it, that was the clear message as I was selecting a school. Private means better. Worth the bucks.

So I signed every loan document, committed to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt—fair trade for a secure future.

It didn’t take long for the reality to become apparent, though I was too fooled to even consider the irony of my situation.

I was attending a private university, accruing nearly a quarter of a million dollars in debt, but I was reduced to stealing packs of ramen noodles and fast food condiments so I could eat. I justified stealing the cheap stuff as "hurting others the least." I wouldn’t dare shoplift anything that cost more than 10-for-a-buck. That would be wrong. That would make me a bad person.

I paid rent with borrowed money, though not enough borrowed money to do much else. I didn't even have $5 for gas. And when I got very sick—severe ear infections in both ears—my boss was kind to me and paid for me to get treated. Otherwise, my plan was to tough it out, work through it. Be a man.

Nowhere for the Prodigal’s return

My grandparents died during this time. The lifeline I had, the family I could have returned to like the Prodigal Son, that was gone before I came around and stopped being stubborn, started realizing what kind of straits I was in. No one else in my family was in a position to help me. Some needed more help themselves. Some even came to me, asking for whatever I could give, and I gave it.

There was a month in there when I paid rent but stole ramen, and boiled water for it on rusty BBQ grill I’d fished out of the dumpster. I treated myself to some honey roasted peanuts I’d nicked from my boss, and felt ashamed with every bite, spread out over 30 days.

I should pause a moment to say: My family was not as poor s some others in this country or in this world. By many global standards, we were wealthy. I couldn't afford food, but I had an apartment. I had a vehicle. Two, in fact—a truck and a motorcycle.

Both vehicles were useless if I couldn't afford gas, of course. And both—well, they really weren't "mine." I had a truck loan and a loan on the motorcycle I simply did not need.

I sold it eventually, and kept the money, defaulting on the loan, because being honorable has no nutritional value. I defaulted on a lot of debt, during that time in my life. I had creditors and debt collectors calling at all hours, saying vile and hateful things. They accused me of being a deadbeat. They told me my life was ruined forever, that I could never own a home, that I would go to jail, that I was a bad, awful, despicable person.

They made me feel like I’d be doing the world a favor if I just died. I was less than worthless, a parasite.

I felt like I deserved all of that. I felt like I was disgusting, vile. And I felt like I'd brought it all on myself—because I had. My choices were bad. My actions led to pain and suffering, for me and for others, and to a level of poverty I’d never known was possible.

Worse than poverty. Nothing I owned was really mine, it was all on credit. My life was debt.

Origin of an Outsider

My whole life, I've perceived that I was abandoned, unwanted. This is true in certain respects. I was the product of a fling, my father walking away from my mother and back to his wife—all of them not even in their 20s. He didn't even know I was on the way. He sired a daughter who is only two months younger than me.

She’s wonderful, and has an incredible family and a beautiful life. I met her, late in our lives, but I’ve stopped intruding on her life. I felt like it was intruding, anyway. I don’t want to be a reminder to her of any of the pain surrounding her own life. I was raised by mother’s family, but she was raised by my father’s side. Things happened. Nothing I’ll discuss here—it’s her life, her privacy. But I do have some experience with that side of my lineage.

When I was born, my father's side of the family threatened my mother, if she ever claimed I was his son. They threatened to shame her publicly, to drag a bunch of guys into court to claim she'd slept with them all. They would paint her as a whore.

So it was better for me to be a bastard than for her to be a whore. I respect that decision—there was really no one to advocate for my mother, no one who could protect her. She and my grandparents did what they felt was right.

Most of my family did.

A strange quirk to this story:

My father's sister ended up marrying my mother's brother. Parse that one for a minute. But basically, they were my aunt and uncle both ways. No incest required, just a combination of some poor life choices and a true, lifelong love. Until my uncle’s death, he and my aunt were one of the power couples in my family, examples I still think of when I ponder what a successful marriage looks like.

But it was my blood aunt and blood uncle, constant parts of my life growing up, who most vehemently denied my lineage. I was not my father's son. It would not be discussed. I was never even told who my real father was, until I was nearly 20 years old. And even then, there was a strong hint that I was getting privileged information, something I should keep to myself. Don’t stir any pots. Don’t cause any stinks.

This is the way. In my family, at least. We have a long history of waiting things out, even if the waiting stretches into a lifetime. And this isn’t as bad of a philosophy as one might think. There are many problems in life that are best left to run their own course. Just not every problem. Wisdom is knowing the difference.

I was not wise, and I believe that at the time neither was anyone else in my family. Not in this way. In this way we were willfully blind.

I finally met my father, by the way. I was 38 years old. And it caused some grief with my aunt and uncle. There were angry phone calls and cutting comments. There was angst. Oh was there angst. And then… there was acceptance. The denials stopped, at least on my father’s part. We all acknowledged that the truth was true, whether anyone wanted to believe it or not. I look just like the guy, after all. Just. Like. Him.

So in the end, nobody cared that a 38-year-old man met his father, and they came to an agreement of mutual ok-with-each-other-ness, even love. Everything turned out fine. We’d waited it out.

This was confusing to some. It upset some apple carts. At one point my aunt said to my mother, "So all these years, I was the only one who cared about this secret?"

Don't judge her harshly. She was acting on what her own mother demanded. My paternal grandmother was apparently a strong willed woman. I never met her. I hold no animosity.

But I've strayed from the path a little here.

Enter the Doofus

I was not aware that my family was broken. But I was aware that I came into the world unwanted. I was an outsider. And then I went and ended up being smart, and a little weird. I saw the world in a different way from everyone else. Everyone. So I was ostracized.

I had very few friends in school, until high school. That's when I learned how to pretend to be like everyone else. Where I fooled myself into believing that being smart wasn't a good thing. Only the stupid have friends. Only the doofus is loved. So, I acted stupid. I acted a doofus. Though of the secret kind. I was a clown, showing off, affecting an air of don’t-give-a-crap, while simultaneously acing essays and pulling off last-minute Hail-Mary speeches and presentations. I even won some scholarships for work I did in ten minutes, having forgotten to do it over a two-week lead time.

I’m not bragging when I say I was smart. I’m condemning myself for wasting a lot of really good opportunities to act with intelligence. I had no idea that I was further alienating myself by being both the smart guy and the show-off idiot. I was just trying to survive adolescence.

By the way—unlike most Americans, I loved high school. I was that rare breed of student who knew how good we all had it. The system was pretty week for challenging students to be their bet, so if you could just be mediocre you were going to get by fine. I learned how to skate on my secret smarts because of high school. Something that did me absolutely no favors later in life, where getting the kind of success I’ve always wanted requires discipline and responsibility and self-guided education.

I was in my mid-thirties before I started applying those lessons to my life. A late bloomer.

But I was talking about feelings of abandonment.

To that point in my life, I’d been born as someone only half-wanted, at best. My family did love me, even if they couldn't understand a damn thing I ever said or did. But there was a definite vibe there—an undercurrent of Kevin as the Mistake. Kevin as the Threat, too. Because if I pushed too hard, asked too many questions of the wrong people, there as always the curse of my paternal grandmother—the curse that would name my mother as a whore. Even decades later, when that should have long lost its power, the threads of that curse held on. They made me a constant reminder that I was not planned, and I was, to some degree, not wanted.

Unconscious Otherness

My mother, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles—none of them expressed this to me openly, you have to understand. And so, in a lot of ways, this isn’t real. This didn’t exist. There was never that moment where I was rejected. They can’t see it that way.

They didn’t realize how much I could sense. They weren’t aware of my ability to understand people. Something I use all the time, have used all my life without quite realizing it. I read people. I intuit things. I always have. Awareness wasn’t always there, but intuition was. And looking back, I see all the patterns now.

I was not wanted. I was an outsider. And it manifested in the form of consternation and frustration.

Many of my family members definitely did not understand me, and tended to lean away as much as possible until my adolescence was done and we all snapped away from the middle and went our separate ways. I haven't spoken to anyone from my early life for 30+ years. Cousins I played with as my only friends, every single day of my life left, built careers, started families, and had very good, very wonderful lives. And they never looked back to see where I was on the trail.

And this is good! This is right! None of them owed me a thing, and as the saying goes, “Phone lines go both ways.” I am as much culpable for our loss of connection as they are. I love every single one of them. I’ve never stopped. And my gift to them was to let the connection between of die, because I could sense that my “otherness” was a problem. Me being part of their lives meant having to bend… to contort. They had to reshape themselves with every encounter they had with me, and that wasn’t fair. I couldn’t keep asking them to do that, as they were growing into their new shapes, fitting spouses and children, and all the trappings of life, into the shape of themselves.

I would always be a nodule, never a component. A relationship with me means having to assume an unnatural and uncomfortable shape. I get that. It’s easier if I shape myself to what they need. And for my family, that meant keeping only the faintest whisper of a line of connection. They deserve that kind of respect from me.

University of Poverty

I went to college, which was not something most people in my family did. It's hard to say which of us was smarter in that decision—college brought opportunities, but it mostly brought crushing, lifelong debt. The opportunities I could have gotten for free, though I didn’t know that at the time.

My education led to my poverty, which stretched for many years. Actually, it was worse than poverty—it was debt. A debt that served no real purpose, because nothing I learned while attending University was worth the lifelong, soul-crushing cost. I would literally have been better off taking a trade job, or interning for a media outlet, or simply writing short stories to sell to pulp magazines. I would have met more people with better influence, and would have learned more transferrable and useful skills. And most importantly, I would not have had to scrape by on next to nothing as I figured out my life and career over a 20+ year span, only coming to a point where I could start paying down that student loan debt as I approach half-a-century in my life.

Take this lesson to heart, kids: No matter what you’re told, college is not worth the cost for most people. Only those going into highly specialized fields can come close to receiving a decent return on investment from college debt. And the margins on that are diminishing. Doctors and attorneys often have trouble paying rent these days. Graduate degrees guarantee nothing.

But education…

Real education has real value

That is the most precious thing. Education is something you can own and control and improve, it’s something you can leverage to make your life propounding better.

I lived in poverty financially, for decades. But when I learned the value of real, self-guided education, I became wealthy beyond imagining. It’s a slow wealth, it’s taking time to empower me to solve the difficulties and challenges of my earlier choices. But it’s enabled me to solve them, this I know.

I am an outsider. I’ve accepted this. And there are other outsiders out there, and I want to give some kind of helpful advice. I want to say, “It’s ok. Being an outsider is ok.”

That doesn’t sound so helpful, but if you think about it, that’s really the message any one of us longs most to hear. We just want to know that things are going to be ok. And for outsiders, for the poor, for people who feel like they have no one to turn to, the message that “It’s going to be ok” is empowering.

Here’s another: “You are the one who controls where you go from here. Own your education and you’ll own your life.”

These days, I’m still an outsider. But I have allies. My wife. Her family. My friends and fellow authors. I’ve come to accept that I’m never going to be fully inside these circles—there’s always some distance. But the key for me was to find people for whom reshaping themselves to accommodate me was not painful. They don’t have to conform to me entirely, but they’re willing to have a Kevin-shaped distortion at the edge of their life. That’s enough. That’s really good.

I’m not poor anymore. I still have debt—i’m whittling it down, bit by bit. I’m looking forward to the day that it’s gone. But I discovered real and actual wealth somewhere along the way. I don’t own anything physical in my life, but I own how I think, how I behave, the disciplines I’ve developed. I know that even if my finances dip again, to the point where I’m swiping ramen noodles and fast food condiments again, I can find a path out. Owning my self-guided education gives me a path. Owning my choices and responses gives me power.

Even an outsider like me can use that.

This morning I posted a tweet that I think sums up something I’ve been pondering:

I just commented on a tweet and said "my discipline is language." I think that's not quite true. My discipline is "humanity," and language is just the best tool I've found for understanding my subject.

— ©️ 𝙺𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚗 𝚃𝚞𝚖𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚘𝚗 | Author (@kevintumlinson) March 12, 2021

It’s a pseudo sort of answer to my constant question, “Who am I?”

To that question, there are a lot of ways you can answer, and each is a choice you make. I could define who I am by what I do, which is a pretty common method in the Western world—and thus I am a novelist, I am a marketer, I am a writer and philosopher, a student of humanity. 

That has a nice heft to it, but it isn’t a complete picture. 

I can define myself by my roles—I am a husband, I am a US citizen, I am a Christian. More paint for the house, but not the house itself. 

See, this is why this kind of thing is so tricky. Because ultimately, no matter how I fill in the blank after “I am _____,” it isn’t enough. It isn’t complete. 

And now I think I know why.

In the tweet above I described “my discipline” as “humanity.” There’s a bit to unpack there. For a start, what do I mean by “my discipline?”

Every one of us has some conglomeration of focus that preoccupies our days. Beyond the work we do, beyond our responsibilities and the requirements clinging to our lives, there is something within us that we consider “ours.” Our domain. Our field. Our expertise. 

Our level of expertise in that domain may be subject to scrutiny and questioning. Saying, “I’m an expert in humanity” is pretty definitive, but ultimately it’s more subjective than objective. Because, frankly, the concept of “expertise” is itself subjective. 

I once posted on Facebook something I’d read in Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Workweek. To paraphrase, Ferriss said that if you were to read the top three books by the top three authorities on any subject, you could effectively be an expert on that subject.

I like this idea because of its neat packaging. To me it makes a lot of logical sense—of course you can become an expert—relatively speaking—with the three leading ends on a topic as your instructors.

And that “relatively speaking” that was kind of a throwaway line, that’s important. Because the idea is that by reading those books, you become an expert relative to others who have no knowledge of the subject at all, or who have only limited knowledge. You studied the subject, and that makes you more of an expert than someone who didn’t. It makes sense. It’s logical. It’s the kind of philosophy I didn’t even realize I’d lived by until Ferriss named it for me. 

Brilliant.

I wasn’t prepared for the backlash that Facebook post would bring. 

A… well, let’s call him a “rival”… on the platform took issue with this. His position was that this was exactly the problem with the world, and with the United States in particular. The assumption of expertise, he claimed, was causing chaos, confusion, and rebellion. It caused people to question science, to doubt the media, to distrust the government.

I can hardly argue with this, since it’s true. I can only argue the point of whether these things are, or are not, “bad things.”

I hold they’re not. Questioning science is an out-and-out necessity, and is in fact the point of science in the first place. Blindingly accepting something without testing it is ignorance and arrogance—science is the discipline of proving ideas false, until you can no longer find a way to do so. Until later.

Blindly trusting media and government… well… to quote Joe Biden, “C’mon, man.”

In my rival’s world, I gathered, expertise was something that must be vetted and bestowed, not something you could claim. You could not be an expert unless the gatekeepers declared it so. 

Except… who are the gatekeepers?

Is it academia? A body of learned scholars who have (get this) read and studied the works of the accepted experts in the field, and now teach those concepts to others?

Is it government? A body of people elected to do the will of the people, but are famously biased toward party-line thinking?

Is it mainstream media? A body that has turned character assassination and ad hominem attacks into business as usual, and which relentlessly force-feeds fear down the gullets of the public in the name of keeping ad revenue flowing?

I have, as you may have noticed, opinions. 

But my rival does have a very valid point, and I’d be an idiot not to consider it. 

Expertise may be a subjective concept, but there is an element of public scrutiny and endowment involved. In no way do I believe that everyone must agree that someone is an expert before it can be so. But the recognition of expertise by some outside body is kind of a requirement. 

Consider a court of law.

If one attorney in a case introduces someone and wants them to be accepted as an expert on a given topic, the opposing counsel has to agree to this stipulation, as does the judge. And in many cases, the called-upon expert may have no official credentials bestowed by academia or some governing authority on the subject—there may not even be official credentials for that field. 

An example: In a case involving a car accident caused by a set of faulty lug nuts, the attorney for the Plaintiff may request that a local auto mechanic, with fifty years of experience, be proclaimed as an expert on the subject of lug nuts. If the judge and the attorney for the Defendant agree, then Joe Mechanic is now an official expert, whose insight is accepted and trusted by the court. 

There was no degree earned, no board to approve him, no panel to which he needed to defend a dissertation on lug nut theory. His experience was simply subjectively great enough that a group of people agreed that he was an expert. 

In this case, experience and demonstrable knowledge are the key factors. But is there a line? Is there an amount of experience required? Or a quantity of demonstrable knowledge?

If Joe had only 30 years of experience, would that be too little? What about 25? How about 10 years?

Where is the line between expert and non-expert?

It doesn’t exist, because the concept of expertise is entirely subjective. 

Think about this: You probably weighed the “value” of Joe’s expertise with each set of numbers above. His 50 years of experience is long, and makes him worthy. But 30 years… that’s less, so maybe his expertise is also smaller. And ten? That’s tiny. He’s nowhere near as experienced, so he he’s less of an expert.

That’s how our minds work. It comes down to the same underlying principle of comparative pricing—if there’s a bottle of wine for $50, that has to be better than the one for $10, but it’s probably not as good as the one for $750.

Is that wine better or worse? The answer can only be subjective. If you’re a wine connoisseur, you may find the $50 bottle to be far superior than the $10. But if you’re me, you probably aren’t much for wine anyway, and one tastes much like the other. Unless it’s truly bad, and/or unless I have something else to compare it to, I likely won’t know the difference.

Context matters.

But what if our expert Joe has spent his 10 years working hard to learn everything there is to know about lug nuts? What if, in his 10 years, he’s filed more than a dozen patents on lug nut design? What if he’s read every book, blog post, magazine article, and social media post that’s ever been written on the topic of lug nuts, and how to make them safer? 

And let’s introduce Bob Mechanic, Joe’s father. Bob’s been a lug-nut guy for 50 years, but his experience is mostly twirling a wrench. He knows lug nuts. He knows what makes them tick. But his boy’s the one with the mad passion for the subject. 

There’s a four-decade difference in experience between these to men, but the one with fewer years is the bigger expert, wouldn’t you agree? Joe’s experience has greater depth. The quality of his expertise matters more than the quantity. No one granted him this greater authority, he took it upon himself to acquire it.

And all of this makes him subjectively a greater expert, especially in comparison to someone who has to Google “lug nut.”

But I’ve strayed a little.

I started off talking about the ways in which we define ourselves. How do we determine who we really are?

Again, I think this is entirely a subjective field. Knowing who we are is too complicated to be objective. Subjective expertise is the only tool we have, but it’s also the best tool for the job.

That’s because so much of who we are as a species and as a culture is subjective. 

I’ve been taking one of the Anthropology classes from The Great Courses, and I’ve really enjoyed it. And from it, I’m learning just how propoundly limited our knowledge of ourselves really is. We have studied ourselves for centuries, and more, and yet everything we “know” about ourselves comes down to educated guesses and working hypotheses. Theories get scrapped regularly as we uncover more hints and evidence about our species’ evolution, and our cultural evolution as well.

To be blunt: We know a lot, but we still know practically nothing.

That’s the thing about humans. No matter how much we learn about ourselves, it mostly just uncovers more of our ignorance. 

So it’s impossible to really “know” who you are, with any degree of specificity. Which is why we tend to shortcut the whole thing by defining ourselves by our work, our roles, our alignments and preferences. 

When I say my discipline is the study of humanity, this is what I’m hinting at. I’m watching humans closely, learning as much as I can about how they operate, why they think and act as they do. I’m lucky, because I have myself as a subject, when no one else is around. If my discipline were the study of lemurs, I’d have far less focus time. 

So does any of this help me narrow down the answer to “who am I?” 

Not in the least.

If anything, it just keeps widening the gap between me and a final answer to the question.

But that’s the real meaning behind “discipline.” I’m determined to keep studying and learning, and teaching as well, until I finally know that answer pat.

My subjective expertise on the subject of “who am I,” and on humanity itself, is enough to support a framework of identity. It’s enough to fuel me as I study, growing in my knowledge, and thus expanding my expertise. It’s enough to provide material for me to weave into novels and blog posts. It’s enough to give me a sense of who and what I am, and what my purpose is.

You are likely something of a subjective expert in this field yourself. And as such, you owe it to your subject to scrutinize them with some measure of tolerance and acceptance, and some mercy and grace.

We’re all trying. And we’re all worth studying.

Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling novelist. He’s been a podcast host, a marketing director, the “voice of indie publishing,” a van-lifer, and a sometimes decent husband. He’s a much better dog owner. Find more from Kevin, including a free thriller novel, at KevinTumlinson.com.

There’s been an unintended confluence in my reading and studying lately.

I’ve mentioned before that I tend to read three books at a time (just not at the same time). I like to read non-fiction in the morning, usually something inspirational or self-improvement related, though I sometimes use that time to read deeper research subjects. I often read a lot biographies and autobiographies during the time as well.

I listen to an audiobook daily. These are almost always non-fiction, and can run the whole gamut of topics. I tend to dive into the denser, tougher subjects while listening, as my primary learning modality is auditory. I’m a good listener—though Kara may tend to disagree. I like listening to these books while making coffee, taking walks, driving, and other activities.

And in the evenings, and sometimes in odd and off hours throughout a day, I read fiction. It helps me relax at the end of the day (a trick I learned from Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek). However, reading fiction is kind of a part of my work as well—every writer should read as much as he or she can, as widely as possible, to “train the ear.” And, frankly, to note what works, what doesn’t, what’s good and what isn’t in another’s writing.

That’s right authors… I’m silently judging you as I read. Mwahaha. Usually pretty favorably, though. Maybe you’ll judge me kindly.

In addition to those three books, I also consume great quantities of information via blog posts, videos, podcasts, and courses through services such as The Great Courses and MasterClass. A lot of this is research, though it’s largely unfocused. I let my interests guide me most of the time. And sometimes I let my need guide me—If I need to know something in order to do my work easier, faster, or better, or I need instruction to accomplish some task at hand, I home in on content that syncs with that goal.

I don’t think I’m particularly unique or unusual when it comes to any of this, though I rarely hear other people describe this kind of thing. But uniqueness isn’t the point.

Lately I’ve noticed that all of what I’m reading and studying has a similar theme: Communicating with and understanding other humans, and how those efforts shape reality.

The fiction I’m reading, at present, is Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide. Over the past few weeks I’ve read Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead as well, and in a day or so I’ll start reading Children of the Mind. All currently known as The Ender Quartet.

I re-read these books from time to time, and as I’ve aged and gained more experience, the concepts and ideas that I connect with in their pages tends to evolve with my perception. As it should be. Every time we come back to a book, it’s with new eyes, shaped by our experience with the world.

But the themes I’ve identified with most, as I’m currently reading, are all in the vein of communication, understanding, and reality.

The audiobook I’m listening to is Malcom Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers. That book, as it happens, is entirely about how humans communicate, and how we understand each other, and how we determine reality based on our assumptions and assertions about all of that communication. It’s mostly about how we get it all wrong, how we cannot rely on what we think of as readable non-verbal cues, and how we are ultimately far less competent at understanding each other than we believe we are.

I didn’t pick that book because of it’s topic, however. I hadn’t read any synopsis. I wasn’t even the one who purchased it. Kara had downloaded it at some point, and as I was going through our Audible library I saw that it was a Gladwell book. I like Malcom Gladwell, and have read many of his books, and so I chose it as my next listen.

Coincidence.

The non-fiction book I’m reading in the mornings right now is Capital Gaines, from Chip Gaines, one of the two stars of the home remodeling show Fixer Upper. Chip is a character—a fellow Texas-raised boy with typical Texas energy, ethics, and exuberance. The book is an autobiography with some self-improvement wisdom built in. It’s folksy and entertaining, and can be inspiring and heartwarming. I’m really enjoying it.

One story Chip relates in the book is about the time that he decided to take a three-month trip to Mexico to participate in an immersive language program. He left his businesses in the hands of his then-girlfriend, Joanna.

I won’t spoil anything, but let’s just say that communication and understanding and reality were big, prominent themes in all that followed. It was almost like reading a case study from Gladwell’s book, as not only the couple but the couple’s parents and Chip’s employees were forced to deal with the fallout and chaos that came from Chip’s well-meaning foray into trying to be a better communicator.

Outside of my reading, I’m taking one of The Great Courses, Anthropology and the Study of Humanity. Since anthropology and general archaeology are intricate components in the character of my thriller protagonist, Dan Kotler, I try to study the field as much as possible on an ongoing basis. It’s led to some interesting ideas for books, but also its helped me to make Kotler a better, deeper, richer, more nuanced character over the years. He grows as I grow.

Though the topics and concepts I’m learning from this course aren’t (yet) about communication, per se, the theme of understanding is explicit. Anthropology is the study of who we are and where we come from. As we learn new things about ourselves, we often have to shift our understanding to incorporate those new ideas. They shape and change our reality.

You could argue—and I’d join you—that all of this hinges on communication as well. Anthropologists studying the remains of the various hominids are learning from what the bones and pottery shards and stone weapons are telling them. Communication across the ages. They’re also learning form the DNA left behind. Communication from genetics.

And of course, conveying all of these ideas requires that we all agree on specific terms, and the implications of ideas, and the meaning of discourse.

It may seem like a bit of a cheat, but I’ll allow it. Communication is a vital part of scientific study.

I didn’t set out to find thematically linked work to ingest. And, again, it could be argued that since I’m the one choosing, I may either have subconsciously chosen linked material, or I am creating links myself, finding parallels where none may actually exist, or which may be coincidental in nature. I’m onboard with that.

The fact, though, is that these concepts and ideas are linking and connecting for me, intentionally or not, and are adding to my understanding of communication and the nature of humanity and of reality. They’re synthesizing—the links I’m forming between the various concepts and ideas are weaving a new understanding. One that I’m now trying to convey here, in writing.

One thing that I think Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers hasn’t yet addressed, at least up to the point I’ve reached in listening, is that though we humans are intrinsically bad at understanding each other most of the time, it does not hold that we are bad at it all of the time. In fact, we can verifiably demonstrate that our instincts are often pretty good. We may not get the full and complete picture, and we certainly should not use the incomplete picture to enact any form of regulation or remediation or punitive measure on others, but our instincts about others is often good enough to allow us to relate to them, to navigate the complexities of a tentative relationship with them, to interact with them even in high-stress situations.

As an example, look at Texas.

During the recent ice storm that swept the state, the power grid suffered a blow. If I say “it went down,” I know people like to rush to correct me. It was still there, it just wasn’t active at a level that was useful. The reasons for this are pretty layered, and not at all straightforward. Let’s just settle on “it happened.”

Like many disastrous moments in recent Texas history—hurricanes and flooding being the most prominent—Texans from across the state pulled together to make sure everyone had what they needed. Heat, power, water, a safe and warm place to sleep. These were essential. And despite that fact that nearly the entire state suffered the same lack of these basic human necessities, those who had gave, and those who could help, helped.

There was no separation of ideology, race, income, or education. No one refused to assist someone because they were different. They simply helped. All differences were irrelevant.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey this was prominent enough to be national news. Hashtags like #HoustonStrong appeared everywhere. People from the northern parts of Texas drove for almost two days to reach the southern region, where flooding was putting people in danger of losing not just their property but their lives. Good ol’ boys came rolling in with lifted pickups and fishing boats, they put in at the waters of the Bayou City and brought every soul they could find out to dry land and safety. News footage showed boats with Confederate flags and white “rednecks” rescuing blacks and hispanics, making sure they had water and towels and dry clothes, making sure they made it to someplace where they could get help.

This is not just a Texas thing, obviously. It’s a human thing. If you know a tree by its fruit, you certainly see that fruit more plainly when disaster descends. Humans show their humanity best in a crisis.

Those confederate flags, though…

There was the story recently of a woman snowed into her home, when a neighbor came to her rescue. The man used his truck to plow her driveway, without having to be asked, and without asking anything in return. It was simply a neighborly thing to do.

The driveway’s owner turned out to be a writer for the LA Times. And in a column she wrote that the neighbor was a Trump supporter. She spent her time on the page pontificating over how much thanks she really owed him, and the fact that in LA, no one does something like this “for nothing.” In the end, she decided to give some passive thanks, a grateful wave of a hand, but as a parting shot offered: “I also can’t give my neighbors absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. To pretend it is would be to lie, and they probably aren’t looking for absolution anyway.”

She’s probably right. People doing good deeds usually aren’t doing them out of a sense of absolution. They likely don’t believe they need any, for the sheer act of supporting a political candidate you don’t like, or perhaps you even believe was a monster.

The two are not seeing reality the same way. The two are not understanding each other. Their communication is surface level only, nothing deeper than action and reaction.

Like the Texans with Confederate flags on their fishing boats, the snow plow guy with a Trump 2020 flag on his pickup isn’t immediately trying to communicate anything in particular. They have their own interpretation of these symbols, they’ve assigned them or accepted from them some meaning that is different than what others might assume. And as we’ve discovered, we’re bad at assuming anyway.

What does this do to our understanding of these people? What does this mean for our reality? There is a clear narrative, widespread, that certain groups and certain affiliations are “all” something. “They’re all racist. They’re all bigots. They’re all white supremacists.”

So what happens to the all of those assumptions when you can literally point to exceptions? When you can talk to a man wearing a MAGA hat, and hear him tell you that everyone, even the blacks who live in a city far from his home town, deserves to live, deserves to be warm, deserves to have clean water and dry clothes and a safe place to live?

Let’s flip it.

Because I’m a conservative myself, I often hear the all from the other side. “Liberals are all baby killers. They’re all trying to take our guns. They’re all trying to destroy religion. They’re all violent racists!”

How can we accept statements like this when they’re verifiably false? How can we accept them as true when we can see liberals who perform acts of kindness, who make an attempt to listen to and understand an opposing point of view, who recognize that singling out any race, even if it’s the white race, as all evil or all racist or all bigoted is a ludicrous generality?

Our biggest misunderstandings come when we generalize an entire group.

Our biggest conflicts come when we lay the blame earned by a few on the shoulders of the many.

When we determine that an entire group of people is evil or vile or reprehensible based on the worst evidence of a few from that community, that’s when we are failing most at talking to strangers.

That’s when we are creating a reality devoid of communication.

The reason this happens is because we humans are inherently lazy. We take the path of least resistance in just about every aspect of our lives. It’s far easier to ascribe a label to an entire group of people, to lump everyone with similar qualities and characteristics under that label, and then pass judgement on the label itself. Anyone in that category is guilty by association. It takes less time and mental energy than looking at the merits, arguments, and ideas of every individual.

We’re bad at understanding strangers because they are strangers. We’re also bad at it because taking the time to truly understand someone is exhausting. We don’t even take the time or effort to fully understand ourselves.

Shortcuts and shorthand are necessary for all of us to get along. But they’re also the biggest reason we don’t get along.

Assumptions are a cancer. Outrage is a drug. Combine the two, and here we are, at odds, at war, never able to reconcile our differences.

No, that isn’t all of it. Because for some of us, we refuse to allow any change in how we see the world and ourselves. Because that change would feel like dying to us. It would feel like losing ourselves, like we’re becoming nothing.

Recently there was this weird, alarming insistence from many Generation Z people (another label, another group we can lump together and target, if we need to). The insistence was this:

Hellen Keller wasn’t real, and there is nothing you will ever say that will convince me she was.

Hellen Keller. A factually real, literally existent historical figure that we can show by record and evidence was a real person. We can show demonstrably that she existed and had the disabilities of being blind and deaf.

The hangup from Gen Z appears to be that she wrote books. “How can a blind person write a book?”

Many millions of blind people both write and read, so this is a puzzling question.

“How can a blind and deaf person write a book?”

This has also been shown as possible. Teaching a blind-deaf person is incredibly challenging, but it’s because of the experience of Hellen Keller that we have attempted it and accomplished it. This happened, it’s verifiable.

Nothing you will ever say will convince me.

I think the real root of the problem lies there.

This isn’t really about communication. It’s about conflict. It’s rebellion.

These people have decided that the Hellen Keller story is a hoax for a few reasons. The disbelief that someone with these disabilities could learn to read and write is challenging, but it’s not really the most damning thing, in their eyes.

One doubter cited that Keller’s signature was too perfect to be written by a sightless person. And indeed, her signature is very clean, very precise. Without sight, any typical person would have trouble replicating that signature. The fact is, however, that many sightless people have learned to write in a consistent, readable, precise handwriting. Many have legible signatures. They’ve come to understand the space that is the page, and they know their orientation to it. They may need assistance to find a line where their signature should appear—but practice does, in fact, make perfect.

Another doubter took issue with Keller writing twelve books. While some were aghast at the concept that she’d be able to write even one, the volume of books accredited to her over a lifetime seemed to be more of head shaker to others. One Gen Z Tik Tok user proclaimed, “That’s too much even for people with all their senses.”

This is the part where I say I, as a sighted person, have personally penned more than 50 books, not to mention multiple millions of words for blog posts, articles, scripts, short stories, social media posts, and text messages. That level of output is certainly not impossible for anyone, blind or otherwise.

And further, there’s an absolute litany of prolific blind authors throughout history, including Homer, James Joyce, and John Luis Borges, to name just a few.

Not to mention, there are some pretty well-known musicians who are blind but have produced an incredible output of work, often beyond anything their sighted counterparts have created. Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Ronnie Milsap immediately come to mind. More recently, Terri Gibbs has begun his own career, and I expect we’ll hear an immense catalog of work from him as well.

Blind authors can certainly be prolific. And if they have indeed learned how to write, even being blind and deaf is in no way a barrier to their output. If anything, it may increase their tendency to produce the written word, as a means of expression they have in common with others.

Writing and reading can be learned by anyone.

Writing builds community.

The second argument for Hellen Keller being a hoax is the one I have to credit as being more plausible. I haven’t researched this closely enough to know if this is a fact or not, so please do not take this as a statement as such. But the argument is that after Keller’s handler died, her output of books dropped to zero.

If this is true, it does make a case that Keller’s books were the product of a different writer. Occam’s Razor suggests this as the most likely scenario.

It is entirely possible that Keller did not, in fact, know how to read or write. Learning written language is challenging even for sighted students, and a large part of our learning to read and write depends a great deal on phonetics. Hearing language spoken allows us to more easily connect language to written symbols.

It’s not impossible to learn to read without hearing a language spoken aloud. That much is obvious given that we have in fact learned to read “dead languages,” those that have not been spoken for centuries, even millennium. And Keller’s story includes an assertion that she did learn to read and write. The circumstance of her output dropping to zero could be damning, but it might also be coincidence.

Keller may simply have stopped her work as a result of losing the person she was closest to. Without her handler’s presence, perhaps Keller no longer felt inspired, or perhaps she felt she’d said all she could say.

Can we know, either way? Not really. Not unless new evidence turns up. A journal Heller kept, perhaps.

The real issue, though, is not even whether Keller’s story is a hoax or not. It’s the fact that those who doubt the story are very vocal that you will never change their mind.

That’s a confrontational statement. It’s belligerent. It implies that they’re being deliberately obtuse. It’s a challenge to the world: I will not believe you, no matter who you ware or what you say.

It’s the adamant declaration of a child to an adult. They may not even mean it, but the more powerfully and insistently they are challenged on it, the more they will dig in their heels, and the more it will become their actual, legitimate reality.

This seems to connect to the growing division in the world.

Politics, social issues, religion, perceptions of history, or simply whether a dress is black and white or blue and gold—these days we’ve got a lot to fight about. And the fight stems first from the fact that we not only are not understanding each other, we’re refusing to understand each other. Our disagreements are no longer matters of opinion to some of us, they feel like life or death.

So how do we fix that?

We don’t.

You and I do.

It’s up to individuals to determine, decide, and to commit to the idea that we alone have the power of response.

At the moment, because we are al addicted to outrage, and because we are all clutching to identity as our self, we feel threatened and angry at all times. We are reactive.

But being reactive means that we are not in control. And when we feel like we have no control over our lives, our fear and outrage and anger simply increase. We start feeling cornered. That sense of fight or flight becomes default.

So the only way out is to stop reacting and start responding.

Stop to think before speaking. Stop to think before taking action. Stop to consider before dropping compassion and ignoring the sense of decency that, I believe at least, is an integral part of human nature.

Choose our response to what happens, rather than allowing ourselves to simply react to it.

We reclaim our personal power by choosing.

And what happens if there appears to be no choice? If everything seems out of our control anyway? We’re powerless by the very nature of reality, we’re powerless because others are so powerful?

Respond with acceptance. Respond by choosing, even if that choice is to be outdated. Choose outrage, if it’s the only choice you have. Just don’t default to it. Know that you’re outraged going in. Don’t let it run roughshod over you, don’t let it be the habit you fall into. If your going to be mad, choose to be mad. If you’re going to be afraid, choose to be afraid. Or don’t.

It’s ok to ignore the so-called “only choice,” and respond in a way that may even make others think you’ve lost your mind.

Cheer even when your team loses.

Offer kindness even when someone insists you’re their enemy.

Offer wisdom even when you’re being called stupid.

Laugh in the devil’s face.

The only power you have in life is your response. Even if all paths are closed but one, it’s how you take the path that empowers you.

We’re no good at talking to strangers. We don’t understand each other. We will never be able to control the other, because the other is too busy trying to control us. So let’s not. Let’s control ourselves instead. Perfectly. Constantly and continuously. Let’s choose to assume the best about the other, and respond as if it were true.

Let’s talk to communicate and shape reality like we mean it, and forget trying to get anyone else to think our way. They never will. But we can all contribute how we think to a greater whole.

Unity can be the mind of a community, even if the individual members can’t, won’t ever, fully understand each other.

This morning I left the garbage disposal running.

I could list some excuses: I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers, engrossed in the narrative he’s spinning. I was running the disposal to get rid of coffee grounds from the French presses I use to make coffee for me and for Kara, and I was looking forward to that coffee. I was half-thinking about what I’d like to write this morning. I just came off of a couple of days with no power and no heat and no water. My mother was just coming off of more than a week with no power and no heat and no water. People on Twitter were saying mean, cruel, hateful things. People in government were doing mean, cruel, hateful, selfish things. People in corporations were putting dollars before souls.

I have to forcibly stop myself from going on.

But all of that would be disingenuous. All of that would be just a minor contributor. I was definitely distracted. The causes were myriad. But the reason was all me.

I wasn’t focused.

I’m very big on personal responsibility. I think that if I and everyone else really had a firm grip on our own personal responsibility, we could improve the world by huge percentages. If we looked to our own personal failings and decided that, by God, we were really and actually and honestly going to do something about them, we could use that change and discipline as a lever to move the world.

It has to start with us, of course. Because—and this is crucial—you do not have and will never have the power to force someone else to fully obey your will. And when you’re expecting the world to change in response to your passions, desires, and emotions, that’s the impossible that you’re trying to make real.

Some of us don’t like hearing this.

I don’t. Because I tend to move around in the world with a very real sense of “my will be done.” It works counter to my upbringing, as a Christian, wherein I have been taught that I must fully trust, depend on, and desire the will of God in all things.

Spoilers: I fail at this. A lot. And “my will be done” becomes my default position, causing me to make all sorts of bad choices and do all sorts of cringe-worthy things. When I get mad, I get mouthy. I get self-righteous. I say and do the stupidest things.

And all of it’s on me. If I could (or would) own it, I could make some changes around here. I could change who I am, or at the very least change how I respond to certain things. I want to. I want to. I just don’t seem to put into practice what I know to be true. It’s hard work.

So what does this have to do with the life and career of a novelist? What about this is relevant to readers who find this blog while trying to find more books about “Dan Kotler” or “Alex Kayne” or “Citadel” or “Sawyer Jackson?”

My work is a thread that knots together with the rest of my life, in the fabric that forms my reality. The web of reality that is in the shape of me contains that thread. It’s just one of many. And all are effected by my attitudes, my beliefs, my perspectives.

When my attitude is poor, when I am distracted or distraught, when I allow myself to feel powerless, that’s when the shape of the fabric becomes wrinkled, when the weave becomes twisted. I’m literally bent out of shape. Metaphorically speaking.

There are signs that I’m not being present in my moments. Signs like leaving the garbage disposal running, for sure. But also signs like fighting with Kara over something stupid and ridiculous. Fighting over something I know better than to make an issue.

If you were to read through all of my old journals—and it would be a task of years to read them all—you’d notice a few common threads, in the fabric of my life. One of those is the idea that I want to and should change the way I think about certain things. I want to improve on who I am, to become more focused, more present, kinder and gentler, wiser and more responsive than reactive. I always come to these thoughts as if I’m just now thinking them, but my journals show me to be a liar. Or a fool. I’ve been toeing those waters for a very long time. My whole life.

The decision to change is nothing without the commitment to change.

To be fair and a little kind to myself, I have changed, over the years. It may be incremental improvement, but it’s no less worthy of noting and even celebrating. I have, by repetition of the ideas alone, created better habits, taken on better self discipline. This is the root of my success as an author—I finally overcame the barriers within me that were keeping me from a disciplined writing life.

I still have my hangups.

The road to self improvement has a lot of side paths. Rabbit trails abound, and as we work toward moving toward the distant mountain, sometimes we get tired, and just want to sit in the shade of a hill for bit. We get exhausted by the constant push to do better, and we just really want a place to lie down and rest.

There’s a scripture that talks about this, in the Bible. I’m not trying to preach to you here, but you’ve probably heard this one, and I think it’s appropriate:

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack for nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul: He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
And even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Your prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies: You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

—Psalm 23 (NIV)

Even for non-Christians, that passage has so much hope in it. It’s hard to ignore the hope in the idea of someone looking out for us, someone guiding and nurturing us, protecting us, leading us to rest and peace.

I’ve heard and read that passage my whole life. But it was only in the past year that it really and truly started to resonate with me. It’s really since the world started seeming hopeless to me that this passage started coming back, over and over, as some kind of salve to my broken, bruised, burned heart.

And you can’t read that passage and take hope from it without noting some of the signs of gentle rebuke, the call for discipline: “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

Shepherds, am I right? They lead with that staff and that rod, they nudge sheep back into the flock, they may even break a leg here or there to keep the more rambunctious sheep from wandering away. Because having to go after that sheep all the time—and the good shepherd does—that puts the rest of the flock in danger. So a little discipline, even if it’s painful, is as much for you as it is for the community you belong to.

I only just clicked, as I typed this, to what that could mean for me, in terms of the changes happening in the world. The pandemic is a broken leg. The ice storm is a broken leg. The rod and staff have been put to use.

Am I comforted?

Weirdly… I am.

I’m not spilling secrets by saying I’ve always been a bit arrogant and self-serving. I recognize these traits in myself. They’re the things I’m trying most to overcome in my own personality. I can be a bit standoffish and reticent and sullen. The word my friends and family have taken to using is “curmudgeon.” It fits. It hurts.

That isn’t the legacy I want to leave. I had always hoped that when the day comes, everyone would say of me, “He never complained. He did the work. He was always ready and willing to give and to help. He was kind and gentle and wise.”

If I died today, I doubt there are any on this Earth who could honestly say these things of me. That’s not ok. But it’s not over.

I keep coming back to committing to being someone better than I was, over and over, because there is a part of me that still holds onto hope, still insists that change is possible. I am not the sum of my worst choices. I am not simply the worst thing I’ve ever done. No one is.

Focus is hard. Being present is hard. Change is hard. Hope starts to fade when we start to believe that the hard things are impossible things. When we start to believe that we simply are who we are, that we’re incapable of change or growth, that failure and pain are our legacy, that’s when things feel dark to us. That’s when we tend to give up. Death is the only conclusion.

But that’s the untruth. That’s the deception.

You don’t have to be a Christian to realize that there is an undercurrent of evil in the world, and it wants you. It wants to consume you, devour you, digest you. But it likes its meat tenderized. It can’t digest us until we’ve been pulverized, beaten down by our own choices and biases and prejudices and self-loathing. The evil that is in the world has no teeth, so our bones need to be powdered and our muscles need to be shredded and our soul needs to be liquified, or it can’t feed.

The evil that is in the world tricks us into being the cooks who prepare our own lives to be devoured. it does this by insisting that we think of ourselves as weak, as victims, as powerless. It does it by fooling us into thinking that everyone around us is “other.” That no one in our sphere can know or understand us. That those who disagree with us are the enemy.

They’re not.

We’re not.

The enemy is lack of hope. The enemy is lack of compassion, lack of mercy, lack of grace. The enemy is reaction instead of response. The enemy is the entropy of good in the name of self-service and self-righteousness. The enemy is the decision that our will be done, and that anyone who opposes that will must be destroyed.

We all face the enemy every day, and we think it wears the faces of those who disagree with us or stand against us. Sometimes we think it wears our own face.

But here’s our rally cry—we are powerful.

Every choice we make is the power of our will. Every response we think through, instead of allowing reflexive reaction to drive us, is our personal empowerment. Every time we see someone do or say something hateful or evil and we make the effort to look past it, to see the glow of their soul beneath that pall of hate, we are grasping the power to change the world. We can change the world, individual by individual. Because each of us is powerful.

We forget. We can be weak. That’s going to happen. That’s alright. That’s why it’s so very important that we have a community, that we work with all our strength to build a community and a tribe not of like-minded others, but of people who realize it’s entirely up to each of us to nurture others, to love others like we love ourselves.

Aren’t you tired of the fight? Aren’t you exhausted by all the outrage? I am. I so am.

So here’s what I believe: I’m meant to serve you. I’m meant to be this not-other I’m talking about. I’m meant to encourage you to be a not-other as well. I’m meant to use words to convince you, and I’m meant to use my life to convince you. I’m meant to serve you with these skills I have, God-given skills and talents. And if you don’t believe in God, then they’re simply gifts, and I’m meant, I’m designed, to share them with you, in support of you.

I hope you’ll feel the same way, and support me and help me and, yes, serve me. We’ll serve each other. We’ll look at the current of evil running through the world, and dam it off. We’ll build channels and paths, build bridges and roads, build walls not to keep the Other out, but to protect all of the Not-Others that we’re now a part of.

What do you think?

Can you and I look past hate, get past our self-serving natures, get over our fear of and anger toward the Other, and become Not-Others? I’m walking your way. I’m feeling around in this darkness, to see if I can find you. Meet me halfway? Or I can come further, come closer to you. It would just be so nice, it would be such a comfort, if you starting coming toward me, too.

And I promise, I’ll try to remember to turn off the garbage disposal.

Writing is a tough life.

Granted, it’s not like I have to dodge bullets or duck for cover when planes fly over. I don’t have to dig my food from a dumpster or deal with droughts or famine. By comparison to some, in this great big world, I have a very cushy life. By comparison to most, even.

Writing isn’t necessarily a life or death struggle physically, but it can take a toll on you emotionally and spiritually. And, well, yes… physically, too.

Ask Hemingway. Ask Plath. As Poe.

I have great admiration for writers. All of those who can face the blankness before them, the existential nothing that demands to be filled with the very soul of the writer—it’s a brave bunch. I’m honored to be counted among them.

Recently I saw this tweet online:

You become what you write

— HUSTLE & CONQUER (@hustlenconquer) February 9, 2021

Five simple words. No punctuation. One of the biggest ideas I know. It says everything I could ever want to express about writing, in far fewer words than I could force myself to use in its expression.

Writing is a tool—my favorite tool, my hammer for every nail—that can illuminate the writer as much as their subject. It can define the explainer even as they explain. Handy stuff. A powerful force.

I’ve told you before, I’m a “discovery writer.” I pants my work. I make it up as I go. I really never have any idea what’s going to go onto the page until I read it, much the way it works for the readers themselves. So it’s as much a surprise to me as it is to you, when I say something clever. It may even be a bigger surprise to me.

The power of writing to shape and mold our lives is simply profound. If you think about it, writing is that very thing that we often wonder about—the answer to the question, “Can thoughts really become things?”

They can. They do.

You’re reading through my thoughts right this second. The aftermath of my thoughts becoming things is right here for you to explore. It’s incredible.

And it can be life changing.

Hopefully it is so for the reader, more often than not. But I don’t count on that. When I write, it’s with the intention of changing only one life: My own.

Everyone else is a bonus.

But to this idea that you become what you write about, I want to share a single thought:

Writing allows you to shape who you are, which allows you to shape the world within your sphere of influence. If you want something, if you need to change or to grow or to become someone else, writing is the tool that will help you do that. Writing down who you are and who you will become will be an important first step. Writing down what you want will make it more real to you. Writing down the world as you would like to see it will open your eyes to it as it unfolds.

I recently pulled together a short story collection I plan to release, and titled it “Lies that Tell the Truth.” Short fiction is, effectively, an untruth, at its core. But stories can, and often do, contain the kernel of a truth that may be profound to the reader. They’re a way for us to explore dangerous ideas with a safety net. They let us think like someone else, experience something new, understand something complex.

Writing does that without demanding you do anything more than run your eyes over the page or screen. How wonderfully profound is that?

I love it.

I have always loved it.

Good writing can and does change the world. It starts with the writer, it leaps from their mind to that of the reader, it spreads with that reader’s love and enthusiasm for the work. Good ideas pass. Bad ideas die on the vine.

If you want to change the world, change yourself. And if you want to change yourself, write.

That’s my advice, anyway. Let’s see if it takes.

At this very moment I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Cedar Park, Texas. I’m about 20 minutes from the site where Kara and I are building a house—the home we’re aiming to move into sometime over the next seven months. A long time to be patient, we’ve discovered. Especially since we’ve already been patient since November as it is.

We like Cedar Park. The area seems clean and safe, there’s a sort of calming energy to it. There’s a very “home” vibe here, already. House or no house.

This sort of thing really hit us when we rolled back into town after spending a couple of weeks in Waco and then Canton. We’ve been to Waco before—we’re fans of the Magnolia Market and everything Chip and Joanna Gaines are building. We like the industry and work ethic of those two. Waco, on the other hand… it’s not really for us.

Canton was nice. The people we encountered there were good and kind. The fact that everyone was there for one of the biggest flea markets on the planet surely helps. But when the trade days were over and we found ourselves winding down in a local RV park, struggling to get LTE signal so we could work, we decided it was time to move on. So we hoofed it back here.

And that’s when it happened.

It was almost the instant we rolled into familiar territory here. We passed a sign telling us where we were, and then spotted some landmarks we recognized, and that was it. We suddenly, strongly, felt at home.

We’ve felt that before.

On our way back to Texas, after spending a rough patch in Colorado Springs—temperatures below freezing, a bout of bronchitis, an “incident” with the black tank on the van—the instant we crossed the state line I felt my powers returning. Home. That was the feeling.

It happened again when we got to our old stomping grounds, around Sugar Land, Texas. I felt that boost of energy that only the familiar can provide. The feeling of being in a safer, warmer place. The feeling of being in a place where someone cares for and loves you.

Something, though, was changing.

Kara and I have lived around the Sugar Land area for years. It’s only about an hour north of where I grew up, and so everything within seventy miles feels like “home” to me. But before we’d gotten back to Sugar Land, Kara and I had already started looking for a place to live in the Cedar Park area. We landed in a new housing development in Liberty Hill, wedged between Cedar Park, Leander, and Georgetown. And we’d spent a few weeks driving around, exploring, staying in the occasional RV resort or extended stay hotel. We started to become familiar with our surroundings, and from there things started to feel like home. In fact, it started feeling more “home” than where I was raised.

And to me, that’s weird.

Humans are weird in general, really. Because our sense of “home” does shift and change depending on the context of our lives. We are adaptive and adaptable, when it comes to our living situation. We can transplant ourselves nearly anywhere and, with some nesting and acclimation, that place becomes home.

With one caveat.

One of the reasons Sugar Land has been “home” for us for so long is the fact that Kara’s family lives there, and my own family lives only about 45 minutes from there. The people we love were always in that area, and that was what made it home.

But a strange phenomenon is happening as the two of us consider new digs. Something I couldn’t quite have predicted.

First, Kara’s folks announced to us, while we were living full-time on the road, that they were “pulling a Kevin and Kara.” They’d taken a road trip to the Texas Hill Country, and had found a place they liked. So they’re building a house, selling their Sugar Land Home, and transplanting.

The reasons that’s a “Kevin and Kara” is because the two of us have always been pretty spontaneous about our living arrangements. We’ve lived in six rental properties, two “borrowed’ homes, one house we’ve purchased, and three RVs since we got married in 2006. And every one of those homes was something we decided, on a whim, to try out. We wouldn’t trade any of them for anything.

And we had, at one point, told Kara’s folks that we’d come to love the Texas Hill Country. We loved it so much, we thought we might come back around and find a place to live there. And, being us, it was a pretty fair bet that we’d do exactly that.

It must have inspired the two fo them, because they rolled right up to the hill country to find a place for themselves. And they told us all about it over one of our weekly video chats.

Once we learned that her folks were moving to the area, it shifted things a little. We were both getting tired of Sugar Land—and particularly of little things like hurricanes and flooding, threatening us for a few months out of every year. So knowing that we’d have family in the Hill Country now made it easier to just decide. We were going to find a place, and we were going to make the area home.

And then a surprise…

When my mother and brother heard we were moving to the area, they decided it would be a good move for them as well. My mother is getting close to retirement, and my brother has been looking for a change. This seemed like a good time time take a leap, to start fresh.

So, they’re looking for they’re looking to move here as well.

Suddenly, the largest chunk of my family was now going to live in a completely different part of the state. And once that happened… well… home shifted position.

This is still a weird thing, and I still haven’t pieced out what any of it means. But in my mind things have shifted the way you might movie a pin in one of those map apps. The little red divot used to point to Sugar Land and its surrounds, and now it’s pointing to Cedar Park. And the old area is now just “a place I’m familiar with.”

Home, though, is here.

Here… not just in a place that’s familiar, but with people I love. Here, where I can swing by to help my mom with something in her place. Here, where I can go play golf with my father-in-law. Here, where my brother can swing by to check in on our house while we’re off on a road trip.

These are the things you do when you are home. These are the elements that make a home. The location has changed, but it’s still home.

It’s weird because my family is coming with us to a new world, a new experience. For the past 15 years, Kara and I have always been kind of out on our own when it came to our adventures. But this time, everyone else is coming along, too.

Reflecting on this, thinking about what it means to be home, to feel at home, to think of a place as home, is changing a lot about my perspective. It’s making me rethink a lot of the assumptions of my life. I was already comfortable with the “home is where you park it” concept of RV living, but now I’m realizing that it can go deeper than that.

Because one day, all those people who are my home may be gone. People pass, leaving you behind. It’s happened to me a lot. There’s a sense of loss that comes with it. And that loss, I now realize, is that part of my home fading. The threads of connection between me and that person, in that place, in that time—they thin out. They don’t snap. They’re always there. But they become more memory than reality.

When those people who are home are gone, I’ll still, somehow, feel at home wherever I am. I’ll still feel a connection to the people and the place. I’ll form new threads of connection. I’ll become more familiar. I’ll become more at home.

And I’ll be home for someone else.

Weird, right?

I’ve kept journals for years. Which is not to say that I’ve always been diligent about keeping them. There are gaps. I always feel guilty about the gaps.

But I’ve been fairly consistent about coming back to the journals, usually with an entry along the lines of, “It’s been awhile. I feel bad that I haven’t kept up this record of my life. I’ve committed to doing better.” Then, six months later, “Well…. that didn't work.”

There are several gaps like that, over a 48-year period. And yes, it hurt like hell to write that last sentence. Holy crap… forty-eight years. I still imagine myself as a 20-something at most.

Anyway, my delusion and ever-plodding pace toward inevitable death aside, even though there have been gaps in my journal-keeping, there have also been long and glorious streaks. In fact, I’m currently on one of those—a streak stretching back about 10 years, at this point. And though within that 10 years there are the occasional micro gaps, they last days, maybe a month or so sometimes, but definitely not years. And they tend to correlate with life events.

I didn’t journal much while I had COVID, for example. Or while I had bronchitis. Things that sucked the energy right out of me, disrupting every routine in my life. I journaled less, though. I didn’t stop entirely. And for that, I’m glad. There should be some kind of record of events like that, in my life. Something I can look back on, and learn from, by examining the experience and what I was feeling about it.

For the past couple of years, my journaling has evolved to include “three things.”

It all started when I was listening to a podcast from Tony Robbins. He was actually talking to the producer in the room, the guy monitoring and controlling the equipment Tony was using. He said something to the effect of, “If you wrote down three business ideas every day for 30 days, at the end of it you’d have 90 ideas.”

Ideas are easy, he was saying. Don’t let a lack of ideas stop you. Come up with the ideas, find the one you like best, and then dig in on making that idea happen. Action is the real magic.

But having the ideas can help you create the plan of action. That was the point.

I liked this point. So for 30 days I wrote down three ideas. And since that only took up the top third fo the page in my little Moleskine pocket journal, I started using the rest of the page to jot down thoughts, bits of philosophy, tiny records of my life. It turned out that writing those three things every day was an excellent and easy primer for getting myself to write consistently and daily in my journal.

After 30 days, just as Tony said, I had 90 new business ideas. And some were really good. I committed to a few things, combining things to form a direction and a plan. The results of that were something I can’t yet talk about… but it was good. Very good.

After 30 days of that, though, I was kind of hooked. So I thought, why not keep going?

Except I was kind of burned out on coming up with new and original business ideas. I was starting t repeat myself, to create variations on a theme. I wanted to do something else for my next 30 days of 3 things. Something that would be useful, but would also keep working as my daily primer.

I decided to write down three marketing ideas per day.

Three ways to improve the odds that my ideal readers would discover my books and buy them. Three ways to make sure my books were there and ready when they were. Three ways, every single day, that would give me some direction on reaching a new level for my writing career.

That worked too.

For 30 days I generated 90 marketing ideas that ranged from easy-to-implement to I’m-gonna-need-a-team-for-this. Some ideas were farfetched. Some were impossible without specific conditions. But there they were—90 marketing ideas for me to use or discard.

I’ve used a lot of them so far. And I’ve seen my writing career take off in interesting ways.

That practice—three ideas per day for thirty days—it was really working. It was reshaping my career in profound ways!

So I wondered… could it do the same to my life?

What cold I write three times per day that might have some kind of positive impact on how I think, behave, and live? What kind of wisdom could I jot down, each and every day?

And it hit me… wisdom was what I needed, so wisdom was what I would write down.

Three pieces of wisdom, every morning, right at the top of my journal. And then I’d write a short entry to fill out the rest of the page each day.

The rules for this were pretty simple: The wisdom could be anything I felt had a profound truth behind it. It could be a quote I’ve heard from someone else, or an observation I’ve made on my own. It had to be succinct enough to put behind a bullet point. It had to be something that could be understood at a glance.

Rules in hand, habit already formed, the very next morning I started.

3 Pieces of Wisdom.

For awhile I did lean on quotes and aphorisms and scripture. Things I’d learned through years of reading and observing. The sort of things you find in inspirational tweets and on bumper stickers.

Gradually, though, I started writing my own tidbits of wisdom—phrases that summed up things that I myself had learned, from living in the world and interacting with other humans. Things I learned by introspective observation.

Here’s what surprises me: I will sometimes write things that I didn’t realize I believed. And when I test them against the fires of public opinion, they tend to hold up. They are accepted as wisdom.

That’s weird to me.

You have to understand that when I write, sometimes it’s a fully automatic thing. I’m what’s known in the business as a “discovery writer,” or in the indie publishing world, “a pantser.” As in “someone who discovers the story as he writes,” or “someone who writes by the seat of his pants.”

I don’t outline. I don’t plan. When I sit down to write a novel, the most I usually have prepared in advance is a title. I don’t even know what story I want tell until I’ve finished telling it.

That’s weird, right?

Casting aside the crowd that rolls its eyes at this or rushes to point out flaws in my work as proof that my methods make for bad writing—you guys… so warm and fuzzy—this method of discovery writing has been the foundation of a long and successful career for me. It’s my bread and butter. It’s the roof over my head. Thanks to this method of writing as I go, my wife and I travel full time in a van that cost more than our first house, and we’re building a dream home in the Texas hill country.

Cast dispersions, if you like. I live in the house that words built.

But yeah, it’s weird. It’s beyond strange that with no source material whatsoever someone can sit down and tap words onto a screen, and those words can have meaning. And in fact, there can be a meaning beyond anything the writer intended.

This happens all the time, and not just to discovery writers. Many of the books we love have traditionally interpreted meanings and symbolism that the authors have often admitted they had never intended, and didn’t realize was there.

There’s an old joke about a teacher inviting an author to visit her English Literature class. Before bringing the author to the podium to speak, the teacher introducing him with some observations about this work, and particular zeroes in on the symbolism of the blue curtains in a particular scene. “I immediately picked up on the symbolism of the curtains—the serenity fo the blue, the transience of life played out as they billowed from the breeze of the open window. It was one of the most moving examples of metaphor I’ve ever read.”

The teacher then smiles and invites the author to come forward, to the applause of the classroom.

When the author stands at the podium he smiles, shaking his head. “Thank you for that lovely introduction,” the author said. “And for pointing out that scene, with the curtains. Such a deeply insightful observation! And here, all this time, I just thought the curtains were blue and someone left the window open!”

The first time I heard that story, I laughed. Years later I heard it again, with a few books under my belt, and I smiled. Because by then I’d had a few teachers introduce me to their classes, and I’d had more than one person explain to me the symbolism and metaphors of my work. And I knew that sometimes the curtains are just blue, and sometimes the windows are just open.

But there’s another truth to that story. One that makes it even more ironic.

Because even though the author hadn’t intended any of the things the teacher had noticed in the work, their truth was there all the same. The symbols were there for the teacher to interpret. And her interpretation was there for the students (and the author) to hear, and to consider, and to learn from.

Without intending it, the author wrote truth. And without anything more than the scene and her own interpretation, the teacher created and shared wisdom.

It came to her, then spread from her to others, without any intention at its root. Just wisdom, found in the raw.

There’s a term for that Eastern philosophies sometimes apply to that sort of wisdom. They refer to it as a sutra. A universal truth, encapsulated in a phrase. And sometimes, many times in fact, the sutra is the result of an unintended turn of phrase. Wisdom emerges, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

In the book of Proverbs, in the Old Testament and the Torah, wisdom is described as a woman standing by the gates of the city, calling for all to find her and follow her. The implication—and one reiterated throughout the book of Proverbs—is that wisdom is something that exists independent of the thoughts of humans. Wisdom is there, calling, and we will find her if we just look.

That’s essentially what I think is happening, when I jot down three wise ideas every morning. That part of me that taps into the symbolism and metaphor of the universe is calling out to wisdom, and wisdom answers by showing up. I write down the things that come to mind, and there she is.

Always?

Always.

And not just there.

Something I’ve discovered, over the past few years, is that wisdom is hiding in plain sight all over the place. It’s right there—it’s everywhere. Sutras, right out in the open. Truth from the mouths of babes. A reality underlying reality, buried but visible if we just dig, just a little, under the surface.

A couple of years back there was a show called “The Good Place.” There was a character on the show named Jianyu—a Buddhist monk who had taken a vow of silence, and was maintaining that vow even in the afterlife. He was a quiet, stoic-seeming figure, and some of the characters seemed to have moments of realized wisdom when they would speak to him, and were met only by his silence and his sublime expression.

Later (and here were have a spoiler… sorry), we discover that Jianyu is actually named Jason Mendoza—a slightly brain-rattled stoner from Jacksonville Florida, who awoke in the Good Place after a misspent life, and discovered that some sort of mistake had been made. He was told who everyone thought he was, and he was told that he’d taken a vow of silence. So he ran with it.

He was not a smart guy. But his silence made him seem wise and intelligent.

And, maybe ironically, seeing that story play out onscreen taught the audience some actual bits of wisdom, about the nature of silence, of belief, and of introspective contemplation.

Or maybe it was just a funny gag. Things are sometimes just cigars.

But I prefer to think of it as a hidden wisdom, and I think that’s a perfectly valid perspective to have. We can observe things and learn from them, even if those lessons aren’t intended.

in fact, you can learn good things even if they come from bad people.

That’s why the whole “cancel culture” thing is such a bad play. Shutting people down because you don’t agree with them or don’t like them means closing your ears, eyes, and minds to understanding them. As if understanding someone’s point of view might somehow taint your soul or corrupt your heart or infect your mind.

In the novel Ender’s Game, Mazer Rackham tells a beleaguered and exhausted Ender Wiggin, “There is no teacher but the enemy.”

If anyone knew the power of that lesson, it was Ender. He’d spent most of his life, by the at point, surrounded almost exclusively by enemies. And the thing he learned from it all was that the moment you most understood your enemy was the moment you loved them.

If you are unwilling to study and understand your enemies, if you’re unwilling to love them, you can’t really beat them. You can win a battle, but you’ll lose the war. Real victory comes from love, and the forgiveness and peace that builds on that love.

True story.

So wisdom…

I’m amazed, sometimes, at what comes from my fingertips. The ideas that flow to the page sometimes feel like they had to come from anyone but me. In some sense, they probably do.

Wisdom comes from the world around us. The insight we gain from learning to understand others. The love we have for others. The introspective observations we make about ourselves and the way we think, the way we live.

Wisdom is alive. It’s hiding, but not very well. It’s hiding like a little kid that can’t wait to be found. All we have to do is look.

Lately I’ve upped my reading game.

I’ve always been a reader. Back in the early days, when I was doing homework with my dad, he once got on to me for sitting with the reading primer I’d brought home from school, silently scanning the pages.

“You need to read your school book, son,” he said.

“I’m reading to myself,” I replied,.

WIth a tolerant smile he said, “You have to read it out loud.”

I proceeded to read the text aloud without so much as a stumble, going through the book at a steady pace until I’d gotten to the end. Not one flaw. Not one pause to ask questions about vocabulary.

Dad never made me read aloud again. And I probably took all the wrong lessons from the whole encounter. Even then, I had a strong ego—something I’ve struggled with all my life, apparently.

Reading started becoming something more than schoolwork for me at around that time, I think. It’s hard to know—I didn’t exactly keep a journal yet, and nobody in my family kept up with things like “Kevin’s first novel reading.” Is it weird that I chastise myself for not keeping records at age four or whatever? Damn. your lack of foresight, young Kevin!

But I do know that at that age I was set to devour any book that came my way. Which was mostly short, fun little tomes like the books of Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume—two authors I was forever confusing for each other. But the books I now realize had the biggest impact on me, at that age, were those in Donald J. Sobol’s “Encyclopedia Brown” series.

I didn’t just devour these books—I savored them. I studied them. I returned to them over and over, re-reading before it was cool.

I’ve joked before, but I think there may be some kernel of truth to it—Dan Kotler is basically Encyclopedia Brown all grown up.

In fact, a few years ago when I was asked to contribute a middle-grade story for a promotion aimed at young readers, I wrote my own version of Encyclopedia Brown. Alex Kotler, boy detective, was the nephew of the famed Dan Kotler of my archaeological thrillers. He was smart, got into trouble a lot, and most importantly would solve any case for just a buck. Inflation has driven up the 25-cent rate from Encyclopedia’s days.

That story is more or less my homage to Sobol’s books. And it’s kind of a shame that I haven’t written any sequels to it. Maybe someday…

Later in my adolescence I would read a ton of interesting books that would become part of the inner pantheon of influences on my writing career. Some I can remember vividly as stories, but not as titles. Or I can vaguely remember the titles, but not close enough to go find the books. It’s frustrating.

For example, there’s a book that I think was titled “The Magician of 34th Street,” which frames the world as having recently rediscovered magic. The protagonist isn’t as proficient in magic as others, but in his childhood he was obsessed with street magicians. So he learned coin tricks, card tricks, and other illusions. I don’t recall what the plot of the book was, but this idea, and the character, stuck with me.

Another is a story of a young boy and a white dragon. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of this book, but the memory I have of it involves a scene: The dragon and the boy are in an immense, white desert, and the boy is being snow blinded. It was the first time I’d ever encountered the term or the concept, and again, it stuck with me.

If you happen to know about either of these books, I will be eternally grateful for leads. I’ve been hunting forever.

All through that era, I read things that inspired a sort of playfulness in me. They were books that encouraged me to mimic them, and I did. I wrote stories of my own, usually vaguely plagiarized tales where I replaced the names of the characters I loved with my own name, and the names of friends. But the stories themselves were original—sort of an early version of fan fiction, I’d guess. And lest you think that all my work was derivative at the time, I did also write original short stories of my own. I still have a lot of them, in fact. Maybe sometime soon I’ll dig them out, spruce them up, and see what has legs to release publicly. Could be fun.

But back to reading.

It was in ninth grade when reading became something more than just a passive, happy pastime, and instead morphed into something that would shape my life and destiny.

I was in the high school library with the rest of my ninth grade English class, milling about the aisles in search of a book to read during the testing period. That was our assignment—”Find something to read after you’ve finished your tests.” Standardized testing has always been an inefficient use of time, and so it’s been a time-honored tradition to give students something better to do than sleep with their faces planted on their desks.

Give them a book, to use as a pillow.

I was no book-sleeper, though. I loved reading. Except…

Reading on command was never my thing. I read books because I wanted to read books. But tell me to read a book, and I rebelled. That ego coming to the surface again.

So though I loved reading, I was being kind of a snot that day, in the library. I was goofing around rather than seriously scouring the shelves for something that might catch my attention. And it wasn’t going unnoticed.

The librarian knew her task. She was to usher each of us to something engaging, so that we would stay quiet and occupied between exams. So when she saw me goofing off, she cornered me, asking what I liked to read.

I had no idea how to describe what I liked to read. Genre wasn’t something I”d ever put much thought into. I liked stories about people, that was all I know. I liked stories with good characters, dealing with interesting scenarios, and coming out on top despite all odds.

I likely didn’t have that much articulation in mind, at the time. But that’s what I liked. It’s still what I like.

So, put on the spot, I uttered the only genre that I knew for sure was a genre. “I like science fiction.”

Her eyes lit up. She gestured, and I followed. And we arrived at a tall spinner rack crammed full of paperback novels.

She fished one out and handed it to me.

The first thing I remember noticing as the yellow spaceship.

I felt a sort of groan inside, but held the book, looking from it to her and back again.

Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.

The exchange from there was mostly about how much I’d love the book, when I read it. And I nodded along, agreeing that it “looked interesting,” yellow spaceship and all. In reality, it looked like it was going to be boring, but by this time I was out of options. The period was ending, and we’d all be herded out. I needed something to read, and by this point in my life Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was not going to cut it. So I checked out the boring, yellow spaceship book, and went on my way.

The next day was testing.

I have always been a fast test taker. Mostly because standardized tests are a joke that show nothing about the student, and waste tons of tax payers dollars. They shift the attention from actually teaching to just doing the thing that keeps money in the districts coffers, and all students get left behind.

But I digress…

I took my tests fast, and finished early. So I found myself with a couple of hours to kill.

Since I wasn’t going to be allowed to sleep, I took out Boring Yellow Spaceship and started reading.

I’m not going to give you much of a blow-by-blow with this, but let’s just say that over the next two hours, I was down one book.

Boring Yellow Spaceship suddenly became Ender’s Game. And not only did I now have to rush to the library to find more books by Mr. Card, I’d also discovered two new things about myself:

1. I was a fan of Orson Scott Card, and particularly of his Ender books.

2. I wanted to be a novelist!

That first realizing had a more immediate impact than the second, at first. I spent the next several years reading anything and everything Card wrote. I read everything he’d produced since Ender’s Game, and bought every new book the instant it came out. And I went looking for everything else I could find by him, including old magazine articles from his days in the gaming industry. I even read stuff that looked way more boring than Boring Yellow Spaceship. If Card wrote the recipe on the back of a soup can, I bought that soup can and read it multiple times.

I was obsessed. I was a fan. I still am.

But the second realization was the game changer.

I wanted to write stories the way Card wrote stories. And I started telling everyone who would listen that this was the work of my life.

I can be a little hard on myself sometimes. I have this sort of eye-rolling thing in my head, when I talk about my dreams and my career. No matter how successful I am at this stuff, there’s still that part of me that thinks, “Yeah, right. Poser.” I imagine that writing is something I “only recently started doing,” despite literally doing it my entire adult life, and much of my adolescent years.

The truth, when I can admit it, is that I was writing and telling people that I was going to be a writer as far back as ninth grade. And before that, I wrote “books” and short stories, dictated into tape recorders, and spun tall tales verbally my whole, tiny life.

I always wanted to be a writer. I always was a writer.

Ender’s Game made me want to be an author. It made me want to be a novelist. It made me want to write stories in longford, and share them with a willing and eager audience.

Which, over time, was exactly what happened.

My writing journey has been a little different than that of Card and other authors I admired. But it got me to here, this point in my life. It got me to who and what and where I am. I’m grateful.

It all started with reading.

So lately, I’ve amped up my reading. I’d gotten to a point where I was only reading dry, non-fiction books, and only in the early morning, part of getting ready for my day. It had gotten to the point where I’d picked up and. started hundreds of books without finishing them—something Young Kevin would never have tolerated. It would have driven him mad… MAD I TELL YOU.

I’d let the reading slip. And, I have to say, I was suffering for it.

Reading is inspiration. It’s also training. That adage that “writers are readers,” as much as I always seemed to hate it, is true. I rebelled against it because, like I said, I never liked being told that I had to read. But ego and arrogance aside, it’s true and good advice. Writers really are readers. And when we don’t read, the writing suffers.

But reading, like all aspects of my life, has changed a bit, since those early, halcyon days of Cleary and Blume. Not just what I read, but how I read has changed.

Kara and I have been in the van for months now. We’ve traveled the country, and we’ve enjoyed it. Loved it. There’s a lot to be said for travel—it truly is, as Mark Twain said, “fatal to prejudice.” But when you’re traveling full time in a space that’s smaller than most American master closets, carrying a lot of books is kind of not gonna happen.

Thank God for modern technology.

Thanks to ebooks, and devices like my Kindle, and apps on my smartphone, I can carry a vast library of books with me at all times. In fact, though I do sometimes yearn for a good paperback, my Kindle has become the top way I read books. I carry it with me everywhere. And when I don’t, I read from my phone.

I’ve made “constant reading” a part of my daily life.

Because it’s fuel. Because it’s training. Because reading, it turns out, rewires our brains and gives us more neural pathways to work with. Reading literally makes us smarter, better humans.

When 2021 started, I had 174 ebooks on my Kindle that I had either started and not finished, or had not read at all. That’s out of the thousands of books I have read, but it’s still a number too big to bear. I have felt a weight from those unread books. They have burdened me.

So I decided I would read them. All of them. This year.

And I’m off to a roaring start. As of today, I’ve read nine of those books, and have three more nearly complete. I read most of those in the first nine days of the month, so I’ve had some slippage since then. When we got back on the road, there were things that took up more of my time and mental bandwidth, so my reading slowed. But it never stopped.

Right now I’m reading a non-fiction book for an hour in the morning, listening to a book of any genre I want while I make coffee and whenever I take walks, and I read fiction for an hour or more each evening, to help me wind down. On days like yesterday, when we’re relaxing and taking a break, I’ll read for several hours, sometimes finishing a book in one sitting. I’ve only done that a couple of times since January 1st, but they’re good days.

All of this reading is having an impact, too. I’m finding my thinking is clearer, more highly structured. I’ve found my focus is improving. I’m able to stay on something longer without looking for distractions.

My dreams are becoming stranger but more pronounced and exciting. They’re becoming more detailed and ordered.

I’m starting to see certain aspects of the world from a different perspective, rather than falling back into the same mental potholes I’ve always had. That’s a good consequence of reading—you are literally letting someone else’s thoughts take up space in your head. You are getting insight from another mind. We could all use that, right now. Identifying with the “other.”

Just like way back in ninth grade, when Ender’s Game and Orson Scott Card ignited something within me, something that fired me up and changed how I thought, and altered the direction of my life, amping up my reading is giving me new purpose. It’s giving me new resources. It’s giving me a new life.

I’m not going to goad you to go and start reading more. You should, but I won’t push you. It’s a personal choice.

All I can say is that reading, and really focusing on reading widely and broadly, has change and improved my life. And I think it could do the same for you. And I want it to.

And of course… you could always read my books to start.

I’m not above shameless plugs.

Photo courtesy of my amazing wife and resident sleepy-head photographer, Kara Tumlinson

Greetings from chilly Leander, Texas!

This morning we’re parked in an RV park in Leander, having rolled in from Sugar Land yesterday evening. We’d gotten a much later start than I had wanted—a lot of prep, packing, and organization got left to the last minute. But I think that worked out to our favor—it meant a few last hours with the in-laws, a very hearty breakfast, and a chance to catch a nap and do some reading before we got on the road.

A good day, in other words.

There was, of course, the obligatory stop at Buc-ee’s—the Texas landmark super-sized convince store chain that started it’s life in the same town where I started mine, Brazoria, Texas, ten years after I started roaming the Earth and asking where I could get some Beaver Nuggets. Ask and ye shall receive, Young Kevin.

Buc-ee’s has been a long-standing part of my mental and cultural landscape. I knew it first as a tiny, dingy convenience store in downtown Brazoria that in my teen years got an upgraded, fine-looking sister store several blocks away, and miles closer to my house. Just in time for me to get a driver’s license and a teenage lust for sodas and junk food, Buc-ee’s started its meteoric rise to Lone Stardom, establishing itself and its colorful red and yellow beaver logo as true Texas staple. With billboards punning and winning throughout the state, if you’re driving through you’re going to see it. And you are going to be intrigued.

And when you see the mega stations, with hundreds of pumps and crowds that would be envied by Disney World, you’re going to stop. Because nobody can pass that kind of spectacle.

Try the Beaver Nuggets, trust me.

Speaking of billboards, one of my favorite roadside ads in the entire world is a Buc-ee’s billboard, and the only one i’ve seen outside of Texas. It’s in Florida, of all places, and reads “Cleanest Restrooms Anywhere! 797 Miles. You can hold it!”

You gotta respect that kind of advertising acumen.

As much as I respect and love the Beaver (sounds dirtier than I intended), Buc-ee’s is just a way station, not the destination. Once Kara and I had our required road trip fare, it was back to the highways and byways, rumbling along in the Novel-T—our pet name for the 2020 Coachmen Beyond travel van we lived in for four months as we roamed from Texas, through lesser states (sorry Indiana), and into Michigan. We hadn’t intended to go there, hadn’t even heard of Holland, Michigan, before essentially throwing a dart at a map and deciding, “Yeah, that sounds good.” But that was maybe the best place we could have ended up, accidentally or otherwise. It was a healing kind of place, and a good start to an adventure that Kara and I had dreamt about for years.

We made our way through the rest of the country from there, not quite seeing it all but seeing enough to sate our travel lust for at least a short while. We had some bumps (literal and figurative), we had ups and downs, good times and bad, sickness and health. It was a good trip. Four months of travel, just the two of us and Mini, the tiny dog with the biggest heart of any living thing I know.

In November we had planned to go to Utah for Thanksgiving, but between snow and the pandemic and getting sick and a very unpleasant incident with the black tank that I’ll tell you over some stiff drinks, we decided it would be better to go “home.”

So that’s a loaded word, and it’s one I’ve come to appreciate in a new way lately. Home, as they say, is where the heart is. And since our hearts go with us, OR WE DIE, then home can be anywhere we are. Anywhere that we find the love, support, and joy of family and loved ones.

So when we decided we wanted to go “home,” it told me a story, though I wouldn’t understand it until later. This morning, in fact.

We needed to see family and friends. We needed to see comfortable and familiar surroundings. We needed to take a minute and regroup.

So we stayed with Kara’s folks from Thanksgiving through the New Year, a couple of months worth of chatting and having dinner together, having breakfast on Sundays, bickering sometimes about politics and pandemics, and sharing memories and stories. We saw friends, and took small road trips. And I personally read, and read, and read, and wrote some, too. And healed and rested, because I needed that.

But the itch started about a month ago, and yesterday I scratched like a bear rubbing the bark off of a pine. We got back into the van, back on the road, and headed for home.

The next home.

Something I forgot to mention earlier—on our way back to Sugar Land, we stopped near Austin, and started looking around for where we just might want to set down roots. We landed on a place, near Leander. And it’s currently being built. We’re beyond the moon excited, believe me!

It’s going to be months before the house is finished, and there are all sorts of challenges to deal with. Patience is the biggest. And honestly, the way the world is at the moment, there’s really no way to know for sure if things will or won’t fall to pieces. They could. The whole house deal could fall apart.

That’s the risk we’re all taking right now. The world is insane, and trying to steal our magic back. But to quote Red from Shawshank Redemption, “You either get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.'“

The risk that things could fall apart can’t be an excuse to never try for what you want. Challenges and impossible-seeming odds make victory that much sweeter. Like a bag full of Beaver Nuggets.

Trust me, try them.

So for now, Kara and I are back in the van. We’re doing a little “Texas Tour.” We’re first putting ourselves in the place we’ll be living, trying the fit, getting comfortable with it. That’s something we’ve done since we’ve been married—put yourself in the space. Live as if. It’s led to some pretty amazing experiences for the two of us. We’ve gained a lot more than we’ve lost.

This chilled morning in Leander, with my back propped against a cushion, a cup of coffee at hand, and the sun rising outside the van’s window—with Mini rooting under the blanket covering my legs, and Kara apparently building a 747 out of odds and ends so she can go take a shower (seriously, she is one of the most elaborate preparation people I know), well… with all that, what else could I say but, “I’m home.”

Home again.

So what does home mean to you? Tell me in the comments. If you’ve read this far, you’ve earned some screen time of your own.