I handed over a finished manuscript and asked AI to help me edit it. It rewrote passages and changed plot points, and it was right to — I never said what I meant by "edit." What that cost me, and what it taught me about listening to people.
I've been circling the same conclusion about my year for months — walks, notes, a mid-year review I never opened. My wife got there over a shared pizza.
There's a photograph of me from Christmas 2004. I'm twenty-six, grinning at the camera, holding a fifty-pound punching bag my wife had just given me. Two weeks before that picture I'd had surgery to remove a tumor. The doctor's instruction was that I was not to lift anything over ten pounds. I don't remember deciding … Continue reading Fifty Pounds
I turned forty-eight today and spent almost all of it in my own house. My son made waffles. My family gave me cards, and the things written in them were better than the presents (and the presents were awesome too!), which is a thing you can say honestly at forty-eight and mean it. Then we … Continue reading Halftime
A few weeks ago at an estate sale I found a notebook that had to be from the seventies or eighties. Somebody had owned it for forty-some years and never written a word in it. Not one page. It had been sitting in a house that long, blank the whole time, and now it was … Continue reading Ripe
