This Great Quiet

The more I see, the more I read, the more quiet I become.

This: a cacophony of pandering fools, all clamoring for undivided attention. There is a prevailing belief that businesses have an inalienable right to your dollars as though they are benevolent nobles overlooking their loyal sharecroppers instead of a desperate frenzy of starving sharks.

We live in a day and age when some writers believe the tissue they sneezed in is worthy of a dollar-value. Conversely, some writers produce roses with an alchemical magic that leaves the reader breathless -- and are told what they have written is worthless.

In the end the years will drag on and at the end of the road you will look back on your life, if you are lucky enough to be given the time. Some of us won't. We'll be cut down young by circumstance or enemies. Life ends bloody and horror writers ought to know that, not as a fiction, but as a real possibility. It isn't a fate reserved for the "other guy." You might roll out of the bed and discover that all this time, you have been the other guy.

Either way, you'll be dead.

What was it you were doing that was so important, again? And how would you do it differently today if you were to die tomorrow?

It's not an abstract, academic concept. Your heart will stop. The blood vessels will no longer carry the oxygen to your brain and you'll have a minute or so of consciousness left outside of the stalling of your heart. Without oxygen, your eyesight will fail but you'll still retain brain function for a few fleeting seconds as electrical impulses still race through your neurotransmitters and synapses. Time in which you won't be able to think at all -- instead, you'll be lost in a morass of sensation and feeling.

There will be a great quiet, then.

It is this great quiet that determines how I spend my time -- among those who squander it or those who whore it or those who run out of it and those who give more of it than you had before.

Do not waste your time. Should we live to be a hundred, we will never command enough of it. The moment changed forever when I realized I would never have enough time to write all the stories that needed to be written. Therefore, if you are not serious about the business of writing -- you have no call to take up anyone else's time.