A Splintered Mind

Wensday – Entry 45: There are many people who want me to state that 2013 was my best year ever, but truthfully it was the hardest, most exhausting and stressful year I can ever remember living through. This was the year my favorite minivan was totaled and replaced with a pale imitation. This was the year I went through extensive physical therapy to treat two prolapsed disks in my neck and spine. This was the year my daughter's epilepsy worsened due to the same car accident, reaching life-threatening tonic clonic stages for the first time in her life. This was the year I spent months—MONTHS—sick with pneumonia and the flu. This was the year where I lived perilously close to financial Armageddon every single week. No, it wasn't easy going, good, or an improvement. However, that doesn't mean there weren't positive events. This was the year that strangers blessed my family's life with their generosity. This was the year I finally settled on a book project I believe...

Sunday – Entry 44:  It’s been 48 hours since I finished the third draft of my book, and the most complete to date. At first I felt a bit surreal, as if at any moment Randy Jackson from American Idol was going to walk through the door on a unicorn, toss my unfinished manuscript in my face, then say, “It was pitchy, dawg!”. Fortunately, this did not happen, though I wouldn’t mind spending some time with him. There is a part of me that wonders if he is far more interesting than the book I just wrote even without the unicorn. From start to finish, this has been a six month journey. I was disappointed to discover that I had only written 25,500 words. Then I was surprised I had written so many. This was only supposed to be a compilation of blog posts I had written about overcoming suicide with new commentary added. But the book grew in wonderful ways. In those six months I recovered from a spinal injury (still in therapy), overcame sickness, Depression, ADHD, and a motor tic di...

Tuesday – Entry 43: As I write my book, I feel sometimes as if it is a writhing, multi-headed hydra escaping my control with great thrashes of creativity. I know that the new writing I am adding to this collection of blog entries will make the book stronger, but I honestly want to see the project end. I’ve been working on it for six months and there are other things I want to write. It’s time to wrap it up. I recall Steve Jobs’ famous words: “Real artists ship.” This was in reference to the Macintosh days when they kept missing deadlines and were racing against the Lisa team. One of the programmers referred to their process as art, as if one couldn’t rush it. Then Steve summed up a truth in his mercurial way. Real artists ship, that is, they release their work to be seen by others. If you endlessly perfect something and nobody sees it, what value does it really have? I have written several picture books, a middle grade novel, and some short stories, yet none of them were good ...

On a whim…