Starting Out In the Evening

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Welcome to Hacking It! - Writer by Trade.

This is your host, Robert Cavaliere.

And as I start out here in the evening, I'm taking back to where I've been.

And where I've been, it's a long track, years of writing, years of thinking about it, years of doing it, trained in it, and now setting into it, after quite a few years, into this new landscape.

And a friend of mine who will join us, a friend of the show and a co-host, intermittent guy, he'll show up, he'll tell you a little bit about what he thinks, and I'll plug him in too.

But where I've been is doing this, figuring it out, working on the craft, writing.

And I want to share a part of that with you, what it means to do it, to really do it, and to fail all the time, and to question yourself, to work out the doubts, to realize that this is part of me, this is my identity, and if the landscape is new, and we're being copied, and stolen from, and repackaged in so many ways, well, I've worked my way through that.

It's taken a while, but I always come back to it, to who I am, to what I am, where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going.

And where I'm going, where I am right now, is in the middle of a manuscript.

I've been working on it for quite a while.

And the show is about that.

It's about sharing these nitty gritty things, and all kinds of things that have to do with writing.

But that's where I've been, and working through it, working through an end that I've been struggling for a long time, not because I know, or rather not know the ending, or how it's going to work out, but because of other obstacles that come along the way, distractions, all kinds of things.

I wish it was just music, but it's not.

I wish it was just jazz, but it's sometimes not.

And where I'm headed is similar to this friend of mine I'm telling you about, and we'll plug in a little bit.

His name is Dan.

And that is to really peek out out of this isolation, I guess you could call it.

I don't mean isolation as in lack of friends.

I mean as in lack of voice.

I mean as in not being part of it.

And what it is, is the scene, the writing scene.

Your eyes on my writing, this kind of thing.

So, in the last years I've put a lot of effort to get the platforms going, to get the foundations going into what I hope will launch some of my approach, which will mostly be, I guess you could say the traditional publishing route.

And even an international route of publishing.

And I'll share more of that as I get to those things.

And yeah, some self-publishing.

I'm geared to some suspense kind of genre writing myself.

And I'd like to try that out.

I've got a novel that I started too, which is called Night City.

It's about a vampire, a vampires, who awakens in New York City.

Or it could be Philly.

Maybe I'll change the setting.

I don't know.

But a big city out in the East Coast.

And she awakens to a new reality.

So it's my vehicle to talk about, I suppose it's an allegory to how I feel, a bit estranged, a bit awakened from what the 90s training I had, and the 2000s living it up.

Because I wasn't sitting around playing video games, my friends.

No, I was living it up.

I was experiencing things.

My grandmother, who was a huge influence on me from very early on, as you could imagine, she always said that a writer has to experience life and to know things.

And those are all the things that everybody's telling us not to do.

Don't experience anything more.

Just share digitally, share narcissistic images of yourself, and that should be the reality.

But I'm not going to do that.

Not really.

I'm going to share how gritty this thing is, how unromantic it can be, but in doing so, how beautiful it can be.

And if you get it right, just right, then you are dancing with the gods.

One of the things that impressed me a long time ago was this, I guess it is a long time ago, years ago.

Years pass by, you don't know what a long time ago is anymore.

But I read this article, and it was called, Helpful Advice From History's Fastest, Most Prolific Authors.

It's by, I saved it, bookmarked it, and man, it took me a hell of a long time to try to find it again.

But it's called, it's by a writer named Flavor Wire Staff.

I guess it's not, the writer's not credited.

But Flavor Writer Staff, November 3rd, 2011.

I didn't pick this up in 2011, this must have come across me in 2014 or 2015, thereabouts.

But it stayed with me, and why?

Because it's focusing on some of the writer's points of views, and it has Jack Kerouac, it's got others in here.

But one of the ones that I really liked was the quote by John Updike, where he says, make a career out of writing.

And according to the article, says what pisses off John Updike the most about contemporary writers, and he said this in a 2004 interview, is that they do it as a hobby.

A writer ought to be a writer by trade, according to Updike, which must be easy to say for someone who is continually listed as the most prolific current writer and has churned out an average of a book a year, and good ones at that.

I'm still quoting.

But he's stuck to his guns in telling writers to find an audience and sell your book.

He says, this is John Updike's words, Don't be content just to call yourself a writer and then bitch about the crass publishing world that won't run your stuff.

We are still a capitalist country, and writing to some degree is a capitalist enterprise.

When it's not a total sin to make a living and court an audience, I think that maybe what young writers have lost is the sense of writing as a trade.

And that hit me, right?

When I interject that, I hate me.

Writing as a trade, right?

Not so romantic.

Of course it's romantic.

But not so romantic.

The way he's saying it.

And I like that.

It's nitty gritty.

And I like grit.

He goes on, I think that maybe what writers have lost, or I'll just repeat it, is the sense of writing as a trade.

When I was young, it was still a trade.

There were enough magazines, middle brow magazines, so-called general interest magazines, they ran articles, but also fiction.

And you felt that there was an appetite out there for this sort of fiction.

The academic publications run fiction, but I don't think they have quite replaced them in this sense.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry.

Only other poets read it.

Only other fiction writers care about it.

So I don't sneer at writers like Stephen King, who have managed to capture the interest of a large audience.

Any way that you can break through.

I figure if you don't have any audience, you shouldn't be doing this.

Tom Wolfe, the journalist, has spouted off very eloquently about the failure of the American writers to galvanize readership the way he thinks Zola and Dreiser and some others did.

I think you can force this.

We can't do Zola now exactly.

Somehow it just doesn't sing.

So you're sort of stuck with being whatever, post-modern.

And so he goes on, now let's go outside the koisos, this is the the staff writer.

I wish it would have been credit, come on.

On the other hand, he says, don't expect to get rich, it won't happen.

You know, what a debt-paying way to end.

And really, it's a love of labor, a love for this craft, for this thing we call writing.

Back then, 2011, it was already, you know, deep into the YouTube generation, the me, me, me, everybody's got a voice, everybody wants to be the 50 minutes of fame, everybody wants to be a writer, everybody thinks that they should be a writer, everybody's got the balls to say that, and that's fine, but you also got to do the work.

You can't cheat yourself out of that.

And if you don't do that, if you don't do the work, you don't study the English language, you don't know how to work it, you don't wardsmith it, and you don't go through years of turmoil, and I don't know about you.

That's all I'm saying.

Yeah, you can cheat all you want with the AI and whatever, but that's like your brother wrote it for you.

Come on.

So enough of the rant on that.

It is a continual gripe, and it is something that is both daunting and at the same time transformative, because it means that people like me, say just writers are trying to make it, trying to break in, make it.

We can decide for ourselves, hey, okay, so that's what you're going to do?

You think you're better than me?

Well, guess what?

And so if we can really rally, rally those inner forces, focus them into what we know is important, and never mind all the noise, never mind the street noise, the hookers, whatever it is outside, and whatever you got going on in your life, maybe it's just children and suburban kind of lifestyle, which I cannot identify with.

That's fine.

Or maybe it's this digital gloom that we get talking about.

I think it's gonna bust, by the way.

It's gonna bust in a big way, because I think we're gonna double down on the human, and that's what we're doing tonight.

We're gonna double down on human.

Here I am, here in this lovely evening, trying to, Saturday night, by the way, trying to put something together, put my thoughts together, try to make sense, and try to speak to you, and try to connect, try to get back to doubling down on the human side of things.

And that means a lot of trial and a lot of error, right?

The old cliché, but it's true.

And the show is a lot about that.

So I hope you come along with me as I continue on this route.

It's not like I'm new at this.

I'm not.

But in a way, I feel new, and I feel renewed in my energy to want to get back in the fight, get back in the ring, you know?

So one of the things that I did once I read this article, maybe it was some months ago, this is part of a podcast that started out with a collaboration with my friend who lives pretty far away.

And we decided, let's talk about writing, let's talk about this, let's talk, you know, let's just see what we can do.

And we kind of left it off.

We did some episodes and we kind of left it off.

I still kept thinking and we still kept obviously talking and corresponding and making some great progress.

In my case, I had already written novels, so my need for progress there wasn't as much as the need to do the, those industry things, the business things that a writer's gotta learn.

The trade part of it, right?

How do you get your, you gotta get an agent, how do you get published, how do you put together some, you know, formatting, how do you do all the nitty gritty things that you gotta do to get a manuscript once it's finished, to get a package copyrighted, and it's ready to go.

You know, whatever tactic you're gonna use, if it's gonna be self-published, or if you're gonna knock on doors and try to be heard, or maybe you're gonna go into a contest, then whatever it is you're doing, whatever track you're taking to get there, you know, I think this stuff is an important thing to document, to authenticate our path, because it's gonna be needed.

You're gonna be seeing all kinds of avatar writers, you know, not real writers, but some kind of made-ups, you know, make-em-ups from who knows, India, China, North Korea, I don't know, someplace like that, and trying to tap into this market, because it's a sweet market, you know?

You get a bunch of things, you get a bunch of formulaic writing, because we're getting used to that, we're nice and sleepy right now in this era.

It's the 2020s, guys, not even the 2020s.

It's like we're midway through the 2020s.

We're gonna be in the 2030s in no time.

You'll see, hopefully.

So, where is writing taking us?

Is it just this dead end of, like I said, formulaic writing, writing that has no spirit, no soul?

Well, yeah, so it's easy enough to hijack that and come up with some fake writer account of somebody, this and that, you know?

Johnny Two Guns, who knows, whatever, wrote a mafia story, I don't know, whatever.

But you can never really authenticate that person or that, you know, the choices that he had to make as an artist to get there.

And what I'm getting to is that we're at that time, and this is the time for us, for anybody that's in this, whatever kind of art you're coming from.

If you're a guitarist, if you make pots, if you write poetry, if you write, like Uptek was saying, are you just writing for other writers?

Is that what we've come to?

Just to sit in a corner, all of us, and just like the Iowa people do, the Iowa's writing crew does, they just sit and they please each other with all their guidelines.

No, writing used to not be like that.

Writing was a guy, a spirit, and balls, and it just something had to say, hey Buster, I got something to say.

It maybe didn't have to be so edgy, and as attitude as I'm putting it out, but whatever it was, it was important for that to be shared.

And it was important enough that, obviously you got your foundations, you got your training in the English language, you had to write, and you read a lot.

And then comes the heart of things, right?

The voice, the characters, the settings, the ideas.

What makes a manuscript really a novel?

And by definition, novel means new.

What makes it new?

Why am I writing this?

Why is this going to be something new for the world?

And it should always be like that.

It should always be something new.

And with something new, that means you've thought through quite a lot.

You've lived through quite a lot.

You lived with your manuscript, and I talk about that.

It's something I've sort of taught myself as I went along.

One should always be teaching oneself when you're going through this path.

So one of the things is living with it.

It's not a hobby.

It's a way of life.

And in thinking about it as a way of life, and back to this article that sort of made me reframe a few bits about the practical steps that I wanted to take, I literally wrote, and there's going to be a little noise because I'm shuffling papers, I literally wrote the way I would like the road map of my life, of my writing life to go, which would intertwine with my, you know, regular life that everybody's got.

You know, gotta pay the bills and writing's not gonna do at all.

It's not gonna do much, not these days.

So I started with these blocks, kind of like a workflow or like a flow chart.

Yeah, like a flow chart, but starting from the bottom.

And from the bottom, I started with the groundwork.

And in the groundwork, I thought, well, let's do some podcast production and learn as much as I can from that.

This is not my first podcast.

I got another podcast that deals with some really fun, esoteric subjects.

It's called Phenomena Case Files.

And it's a whole different ball game.

And I love it.

I love doing that.

It's just something I do.

But this is a place where I want to talk about writing.

I want to talk about my life as a writer.

And I want to talk about other writers and other artists and their paths and what they're doing that's interesting or what they've done that we should really look at.

And so that's what I'm going to do.

And go ahead and go to cityscapepress.com and that's my press.

It's a press that I'm working in.

It's gonna give you a preview.

It's what I'm working on of the novels that I've worked in and the ones that I'm working on.

And they're not for buying yet because I'm trying to publish it, but I am trying to find some readers.

And then there's a couple of those, Night City and Carmilla, which is a redo of the old novel, but modernized that I would sell directly.

So right off the bat, I'm just going to tell you that.

And so there's another press that I'm associated with, which is called Scriptoria.

And you can find that at thescriptoria.com.

And there's other writers there right now, so that will be great.

That will be fun.

You can look at other people too.

So that's two places, my own personal thing and the one that reflects more my personality and my idea of what I call straight up fiction.

I mean, I call it straight up fiction because I hate the word literary fiction.

It sounds so strange to me.

Of course, it's all literary.

Whatever it was, you know, Gilgamesh, what was that, a genre?

Somebody say, oh, let's do a myth.

Let's do it.

No, it was literary.

It's always our dreams being worked out.

But you know what people think?

They think literary.

They think, well, there's not going to be any supernatural things.

There's not going to be any science fiction things.

There's not going to be speculative.

And that's right.

That's what straight up fiction is.

It's really the mirror of our lives wherever we are and in the dream of that, making the illusion as real as possible so that we can connect with that, the realism of it.

So that's one of the places I started.

And of course, I got that launched and was launched in 23.

In 23 and 24, I got really serious about it, and in 25, it's been a great recommitment with that.

And I've learned a lot of technical things.

Learning the trade of other things, because you can't just be a writer in isolation.

It's one of the things that I learned.

You can't just be sitting under a tree, eating an apple, and hoping somebody's going to come along and want to read the manuscript you're working on.

That's never going to happen, right?

Unless you're really, really lucky.

And that will just be one person, audience of one.

I was surprised by that, even though I've read that article a while ago.

And just looking at it again, just for this show, this episode, you know, what an uptick says is that it's like, if you don't have an audience, then you're not really making it.

It's amazing because that's said, you know, 11, what was it?

2004, a long time ago.

And writers were not thinking about audiences.

The last thing any writer wants to do, and maybe any artist, and I guess accepting, you know, performing artists, which are always going to have a connection, you know, to an audience, even a comedian, I mean, not even, but anybody that performs, obviously that makes sense.

But writers tend to be solitary in their endeavors, and many other kind of artists too.

So the thought about an audience, it feels like that's someone else's work.

But now it's, you know, we say, no, it's always been our work.

There's always been some kind of media where you can tap into, and at that time there were magazines, people.

We used to buy magazines, I used to buy them.

And we could read, you know, original fiction.

We could read genre fiction.

We could read all kinds of things, poetry.

Yeah, believe it or not, we read it.

We picked it up, not just comics.

So he's saying that what we have now is not, I believe, all that different than what it's always been.

It's always been about putting yourself up front and saying, I got something to say.

I wrote something, and I'd really like to share it with you.

So that's where that's coming from.

And one of the things that's in the groundwork, going back to this schematic, this flow chart that I did for myself, was website design, so I did that too.

I designed the website with the help of templates and things, Squarespace, it was all great.

And if it hadn't been for that, it would have been a lot harder, but it's still not the easiest thing in the world, especially if you're coming from nothing, and I was coming from nothing.

And it was the scariest thing in the world in some ways, but it was also pretty exciting.

Once you're really doing this thing, and you're committed, and you're just out of your shell, at the time, even just a few years ago, two years ago or something, I just didn't want to deal with that part.

Once you write and focus on writing, I still do.

I wish I still can.

But there's a beauty to this too.

It's beautiful to connect and to start getting the feedback and start building a community, so that's great.

And that's an amazing thing.

And yeah, if you're just writing...

You know, there's one example.

I'm going to interrupt that thought.

One thing I saw a long time ago, it's a thing, but I don't know from what exactly.

And it's like, what if somebody wrote the most beautiful novel that's ever been written?

The most perfect novel in every way, in every sense.

But it was written in a language that no one in the world, no one in the universe speaks, except that writer.

And you think for a moment, right?

You gotta pause.

Well, yeah, it's beautiful, it's perfect according to who, and let's just say according to whoever, the gods of writing, it's still the best.

But it's still a lonely diamond, somewhere in the core of the earth, where nobody has access to it.

So it's really not anything that's gonna be looked at.

And there are probably tremendous marvels in the universe like that.

And you think about that, but that's not what it's about.

What this is about, what the arts are about, is about community.

It's about sharing.

It's about putting yourself out there.

That's the real deal.

That's the juice, man.

So the next block on that is, you know, I was really struggling with this self-publishing versus traditional publishing, and I figured out, you know, a hybrid approach.

So yeah, get into that.

And I figured projects, which, you know, are my novels.

I wrote a novel called Sage.

I'm finishing a novel called Borderlands, which I may rename.

I don't know.

And in works like Phenomena, and the other novels I mentioned.

So yeah, I'm blowing my own horn a little bit, but it's not for that, okay?

It's not like, oh, go buy my novel.

You really can't even, except for a couple that are coming up, probably this year, hopefully.

But really, it's about sharing that process.

And if you're in that same state of mind, or maybe you're still thinking, I can't do this, or how do I do this?

Well, here's another guy that's figuring it out.

And here's another guy, besides, is going to help me co-host every now and again.

And we're both figuring this thing out.

You know what?

Newsflash.

We've made progress.

I've made progress in places I never thought it would be.

So what is this?

A confessional, journalistic endeavor?

Yeah, it's all of those things, this podcast.

And as I go along, I said, I'm gonna focus on some writers that I think are interesting, not only to look at because of what they shared with us, like Jack Kerouac and whatnot.

It's gonna be on cityscape.com and descriptoria.com, so remember that.

But I want to also look at their trajectory.

What made them break through?

What was the process?

I mean, is there in a way that we could follow some of that, or is that just not, I guess, transferable to the modern age?

And I think you'll find the answers is that there's a lot of things, and you'll find that I found that the answers, at least for me, were that, yeah, you could transfer a lot of it.

That in fact, you could learn a lot from that trajectory.

It has a lot to do with movement.

I'll say it right now, spoil it for you, why not?

Where you are matters.

Who you're with matters.

Where you are age-wise matters, believe it or not, it does.

What you're doing, what the decisions that you're making, small or big.

If you decide, like I decided some time ago, I said, I'm not gonna, and I think I even have the recording, because it was one of the things that I was working with my friend, I'm not gonna do anything that isn't going to advance my writing.

It's a big commitment, right?

So I could have, with all the things that are happening, losing jobs and everything that's happening, I could have said, well, and I did ponder about, maybe I could get a master's in this, or maybe I could get a, finish this thing, do some kind of training in some kind of trade, so I just can feed myself and not worry about that.

Writers, artists of all kinds have always been struggling with this thing about how do we put food in our mouths and a roof over our heads, you know?

I mean, we're not alone in that.

The market is so bad, right?

The inflation is so bad.

All that, well, we're affected by that.

If you don't, if your preoccupations are of survival, it's very hard to ride, very hard to create.

Some people can do it, and, but you're always gonna suffer in that way.

If you can do something to stabilize, that's the best.

And I found, even as I was writing this, I didn't have, I had done some, I had made some major decisions to try to get ahead materialistically, you know?

And they had set me back, this was back in 2023.

And they had set me back.

And so when I had, when the time that I got to writing this, this flow chart to map out a kind of roadmap of where I wanted to be, what I wanted my life to be, in fact, what it had been before, because years before, 2019, 2020, and even part of 2021, 22, I had a life with a very stable job, you know.

That reminds me of a guy that was, you know, this guy Charles Bukowski.

You know, he famously was pretty much down and out for a long time.

I mean, he was writing the whole time.

You know, once somebody, I haven't read a lot of his things, but there was even a movie called Factotum, based on this novel Factotum, that sort of gives you that insight into his struggles.

But it really gives you a bit of a fire in the belly to think about somebody struggling, but at the same time, they're never giving up.

What stabilized him and really broke him out was finally getting something published.

But then really, he also says, it was when he got a job at the post office of all places.

You know, a kind of a job that you can do and doesn't tax you until actually so much that you just can't write.

Or a job that's like, you know, manager of this or just some big corporate thing that just swallows all your time and this bullshit work ethic that basically enslaves you and doesn't let you create.

And there's a lot of people for whom that works.

And there's a lot of people like me who are always going to get compromised by that rat race.

So not getting lost in that was one of the first things I wanted to correct.

And I wanted to go back to what had been working.

Sometimes when you were in a high, and I was in a high because I was riding so well, I was riding things that I wanted to ride, I was doing the things that I wanted to do, and it felt right.

And so what did I do?

I created movement to upset that balance.

And then I fell on my ass and I was pretty sad.

So don't be like that, but you might be like that.

And then regroup and rethink, and that's what I did.

And one of the things that I did, and it has happened by the way, I managed to find that security, even though it's been assailed by all the goddamn administrative things that this government is doing.

And you heard me, whatever.

You want to get political?

Fuck you.

You don't want to get political?

Fuck you.

Whatever.

Either way, fuck you.

I'm just kidding.

But the thing is that the politics and the reality of this life, they affect us in every way.

Okay, so I'm not going to get political, because I'm not interested in that much, but I am affected by what's going on, and you are too, whoever the fuck you are.

So, who am I mad at?

I don't know.

I'm mad at the guy that's going to write the email about la la la politics, or trying to figure me out.

You're not going to figure me out, so shut up.

So, if you can just kind of put some distance between yourself and this nonsense of, I'm in this group and I'm on that group, then I think you're going to go a long way.

The best way to do is to be an artist.

Be cynical about everything and be a believer about everything.

That's how we are.

Naive and non-believers also.

That's what I say.

Yeah, I speak for everybody, right?

What right do I have to do that?

Who knows?

Who cares?

So, next on that was really the way of life, building a harmony.

And that's what I've been trying to do, and that's what I've been getting good at.

And it's paying dividends, because the upper things on that flow chart have more to do with the things that are done.

Once you've tapped into some market, once you've grown an audience, and I know I probably, who knows how many people I alienate just by my F-bombs and all that, there's a bit of anger, there's a bit of a chip in my shoulder lately, and it's been there for a while.

I'll tell you why.

It's because of what I said earlier, the things that hijack us, as writers, as artists, of any kind, it's gonna be those things, we already got a lot of things going on in our mind, all kinds of anxieties, all kinds of nervousness.

What do you think we drink so much and smoke so much?

Well, that's the reasons.

There's a lot of, there's always an undercurrent of nervousness and possibly just instability, because this kind of life, it's a way of life that takes, that's not looked upon as gainful, right?

Everybody thinks this is a bad idea.

You wanna tell somebody that you're a writer or you're a musician or that you're an artist, although if they don't laugh at you straight up, which mostly they probably won't, they get uncomfortable.

Have you ever had that?

I don't really talk about what I do with anybody.

I just don't.

But I've seen it from other people who have done it.

And there's always a kind of wince of a somebody, because that person is a wannabe, right?

You're not a real, you're not a real writer, you're not a real musician, you're not a real actor.

Get out of here.

What have you been?

Are you a millionaire?

You got a lot of money?

Got a lot of women?

Or whatever, you know?

If you don't have that, if you don't have our idea of a success, or if you don't have that Instagram thing that shows how you stay at a hotel for one night but make it look like you live a rich man's life, then you're nothing, right?

A lot of people are just fagasial.

They're fake.

They're posers, right?

So let's not be like that.

Yeah, if I alienated you right off the bat, well, you know, too bad, but in a way, it's better, right?

The chip on my shoulder is about that, and I think a lot of people can relate to that.

But we're gonna go away from the chip on the shoulder because it's not constructive.

It's some negativity that doesn't need to be there and you need to work it through.

What I do is I start writing.

If I'm not writing, I'm a grumpy, and I haven't been writing as well as I wish I could in the last days and last weeks just because of life, and mostly because of self-defeating behaviors and also because of the unstable atmosphere in which we live here, the situation that we're in.

But it's never gonna change.

So let's not cry about anything because it's not gonna change.

It was bad 100 years ago, it was bad 1,000 years ago, it's gonna be bad 10 years from now or 500 years from now.

Right?

It's always gonna be, as long as we're human, there's always gonna be some kind of conflict and some kind of desperation and some kind of tragedy.

But the one thing that we could at least have control of, if there is such a thing as control, is our character, right?

And if we can have that, we can have a better destiny.

The old adage, character is destiny.

And I believe in a little bit of that.

A little bit of luck too, wouldn't hurt, you know?

A little bit of connecting with people about these things.

Getting them out there, let's talk about it.

What are we gonna do?

Are we gonna just sit back over here and just have everybody roll us over?

Or are we doormats?

No, we're not, you know?

If you're an artist of any kind, you know that people aren't waiting for you.

You just have it in you and you're gonna share that, whatever that is within you and however you express it.

So let's keep doing that.

And, you know, it's been real nice this evening talking to you all, wherever you happen to be.

And some of you, some of you guys might be taking the subway, some of you guys might be on the way to work, some of you guys might be coming back from work, I don't know.

But if you're thinking about writing or if you're thinking about expressing yourself in any kind of way, don't think about the rat race so much.

Just think about the work, the work that you're doing.

Organize yourself, recommit, and let's see where it takes us.

And until next time, why don't we meet here again?

I'll be back in, this time around is going to be every couple of weeks, and then there'll be some time to regroup, but I want to come at you at least a couple of times a month, and two or three times a month, and have a little talk like this, and exchange.

I want to hear your thoughts.

What do you feel?

Did I insult you?

Did I offend you?

Or did I hit a nerve?

Or am I talking what I'm supposed to be talking?

Am I on the right track?

Or am I off track?

So we'll find out.

You know, life is short.

Another adage, another cliché.

It is goddamn short.

And because it's so short, we gotta make it good.

We gotta make the right choices.

Hard to know what the right choices are, but we gotta really fight for what we are and what defines you.

And then after that, it's just all jazz.