Great You're Still Doing That, Revisited

Faith was always the worst con - the magician asking you to close your eyes and count to ten. Then one day, when no one advised faith, it was the only thing.

Faith, hope and love is the old line from St. Paul - a go-to for Catholic weddings. And of the three, faith always stuck in my craw, even as early as eleven years old.

It was in fifth or sixth grade that a nun told us we could go to hell for what we thought. She said a lot of that kind of thing. But that was the last straw. How did she know that’s how it worked? Faith was how.

Faith was the brain-dead, all-purpose answer on hand for any adult who couldn’t explain what they were foisting onto us kids, or why they were doing the foisting. I smelled a rat. I sensed a trap. I wrote off faith as a con then and there.

Still doing that

Last August, I finished writing my tenth novel. From first line through rewrites to satisfaction-slash-exhaustion, it came together in a sprint lifted my attention from the daily drumbeat of earning a living and then being bled of that money at an incredible pace. I got the book out in time for Christmas, and won a few honors and some nice reviews. But the drumbeat was still there. I hadn’t made a dent in it. By managing my life with one hand while I wrote the book, I may have put myself further in the hole.