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Great You're Still Doing That, Revisited

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.

Colin Dodds
Mar 29, 2024
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Great You're Still Doing That, Revisited
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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.

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