“…he stretched out his arms toward the water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward- and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone in the unquiet darkness.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

In those few sentences Fitzgerald sums up Gatsby’s longing, the longing that has driven him to create an entire life out of false cloth. All…

Life is really good at throwing curveballs. They go down, then go up, and we rarely have time to react when they go either way. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about serendipity and boredom. And about my impatience with normalcy. Writing, right now, is not enough.

I’ve been struggling with time. Too much of it.

Last night I ran into a friend, a cardiologist. He works with heart transplants. I asked him how things were going and he said he was having a really good day. When I asked why, he said he had gotten a $75000 raise. Yes…

It does not translate into income, followers, or satisfaction. My most popular article by far did not make me much money for a good reason: views from social media don’t count as reads. The piece went viral on Reddit and other places, generating a lot of traffic from non-paying Medium readers who likely used it as one of their freebies.

I try to avoid writing about my own experience with the Payment Program as I think most of the ‘I Made $XXX in Three Hours’ articles are complete baloney. I could once say I made ten grand for eight hours…

When I realized that one of the superpowers of being a writer is the ability to fix nearly anything, my writing got a lot better. Those precious words are just binary bits that are eraseable if you choose. But they can also be saved if erasing your work scares you. I had quite a few versions of my first novel by the time I called it finished. I have never looked at them, nor do I plan to. They are just the scraps of something I was building.

But here's the interesting thing: I had a lot less scraps (waste) leftover after finishing the second one. I either got better or more efficient or both.

This is a shout out to everyone writing here and anywhere. We just went through the craziest year most of us will experience. And we are writing crap. A year like the last one will create an explosion of new ways to do things. We all need to aspire to more.

I’m as guilty as anyone in setting my sights too low. But when everything was both muted, in our personal lives, and over the top in politics and social justice, lying low was probably a survival mechanism.

But things are opening up. Not just society but the possibilities ahead…

Puff pastry is proof positive that when it comes to baked goods the French are off the charts. I’ve made it from scratch, wrapping a block of cold butter in dough and rolling and folding it to create hundreds of alternating layers of butter and very thin sheets of dough. It’s an amazing invention that can be used so many ways, but it is a lot of work and a little tricky.

Fortunately, you can buy it in frozen sheets that cut out all those steps and yield basically the same results. However there is something to watch out for…

Yesterday I wrote over 2000 words in two articles and then complained to a friend that I had done nothing that day. And I realized something. The writing was no longer work. In fact I am super happy when the idea flows and I lose myself tapping away at my iPad. This is after thirty years of writing for a living.

Why following your passion doesn’t work, and then it does

If you didn’t learn at least one significant life lesson in the past year you might want to reevaluate. …