You know, having engaged now in a month of self-promotion, I have come up hard against my own true nature. I am so not the guy bounding out of a Tony Robbins seminar. I'm far more like Ted Kaczynski in a remote cabin, without the bombs. Perhaps some lives are built around denying how truly screwed up this world is? Was? Has become? But honest writing cannot be one of those lives. My point of pride, and I suppose sanity, is to wake up everyday and say, okay, it's a mess, but I'm going to face it and do everything that I can to make this a better world. I will plant my little patch of kindness and charity and hope that it grows around me.

The fact is, when I write, I feel clean inside. When I get caught up in all the marketing, I begin to loathe who I am. Is it too much to ask that someone will pick up what here represents four years of love and care on my part and enjoy it? I don't want to be rich or famous. Twenty grand a year and a trailer on the beach in Baja and I'd be a happy guy. As long as I can write and put to good use the greatest gift that god gave me. My thought in publishing one of my novels was to free myself from what is presently a respectable career as a ghostwriter. World's Greatest Ghostwriter wasn't exactly what I wanted chiseled on my headstone, but at times these days it begins to sound rather attractive to me. At least my life is pure again. I get up to write each day and somebody else has to sell it.

I am left finally with this simple concept. Community. Tribe. If I ask what I can do each day to help those in my tribe, things begin to make some sort of spiritual sense. I mean, so many people are struggling, whether emotionally, financially or whatever. And I'm worried about selling my books? So those are my thoughts here at four in the morning. The wee small hours of the morning, as Frankie used to sing. Really, all I want is a magic wand to wave and make this world all right, and writing is the closest thing I have to a magic wand.

Laguna Beach

In the year of our lord, 2013