--YOU LEFT A MARK ON ME

 ...YAY! 

I finished editing my novel.
I took Nike’s advice.  Yes, I bore down, and just did it. 
I think I’ve written a pretty good book, or at least an entertaining one.
Now, writing wise, I’m not sure what to do next.  It’s been months since I’ve written anything short.  My mind is glued to the longer format.
Sure, I’ll send the novel out, but I need to write.  The only question is what?

…The Republican and Democratic Conventions are over.

I actually enjoyed watching them.  Does that sound sick?  Does that make me sick?
I’ve always loved politics.  When I was a young boy I thought I wanted to be president.  (True story.  True embarrassing story): I even made little cutout posters and Scotch-taped them to every wall around our trailer—“Len for President of the United States.” 
In a rare acquiescence, my parents humored me and let the faux posters stand for a day or so. 
After college, I clerked at a law firm.  It wasn’t what I thought it would be.  No romantic “Truth and Justice,” just billing hours and foreclosing on people’s homes.  I became pretty disheartened and decided to forgo law school, being a lawyer, getting into politics.
Besides, I had too many skeletons in my closet even back then.
But I still follow politics closely.  A friend of mine says it doesn’t make any difference which party is in office, that it doesn’t even matter who the president is.  I disagree.
But enough of that…

…Here are some things I like:

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

"Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things." Robert Brault

"Happiness is often the result of being too busy to be miserable." Robert Zimmerman

"I always say to students, give me four pages a day, every day.  That's three or four hundred thousand words a year.  Most of that will be bilge, but the rest…?  It will save your life!" Ray Bradbury

"There is a sense of exhilaration that comes from facing head-on the hard truths and saying, 'We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail'." Jim Collins