Diligence is the mother of good luck. (Benjamin Franklin)

Another quote I like, I can’t remember who said it, is that the muse cannot resist the working writer. You sit in front of the screen, or chew the end of a pencil, long enough and something has to come. Some days it just comes harder than others.

I love quotes, obviously, or I wouldn’t use them so liberally. I envy those who can spout them off like I can eat fun-size Snickers bars. We went to see Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, and Richard Ford speak on Thursday night out at MSU. Great, great time. It’s impossible to capture what those three authors do on stage together. So much experience, so much talent, and all so very literary. It’s a great gift to have such a passion and talent for crafting words. It’s comforting to think that, while I hardly aspire to be of that caliber, I am doing all the semi-right things for where I want to go with my life. One of the men said he writes because that was the only thing he was ever any good at. There are days I feel the same, since splitting open square bales or stacking them in the barn, or calving cows are hardly viable professions any more.

For those of you wondering, stacking hay is what Dad and I did this morning. 316 bales, give or take one or two. And splitting open wet bales was what we did on the 4th.

I’ve got a pile of 16 books beside my bed right now, all begging to be read, all research for Taylor and upcoming books. An odd mixture of animal behavior, shamanism, werewolves, and unicorns. All right, the unicorn book isn’t for Taylor. It’s for a short story I’ve been working on. I developed the idea years ago and only recently returned to it, knocking it down from high aspirations of becoming a novel to a novella at the most, a short story at best. I have a lot of those. There just isn’t enough there for the story to make it as a novel. But it makes a kick-ass short story. And I get a break from Taylor’s world and get to play around in one I’ve lived in, on and off, for the past twelve years. Okay, I’m into that writer’s ramble now. Better wrap this up.