Between the expectations of genre and bland uniformity, there's a lot of room to be irreplaceable if you have the courage to both listen to, and use, your own vision.

My, that's a provocative title, no? Well, it's nothing like that... it's simply that I'm finally getting back to finishing my novel, Brave Men Run. See, July has been just awful when it came to writing. There was just too much pressure from the Cursed Day Job, too many outside things taking not just my time but, more importantly, my energy. Today, a few days before the end of the month and more than thirty days since I've written a word of the book, I'm just starting to feel halfway normal. Yesterday I dipped into the book and read the last few scenes. And I felt like I could get back to it. I felt the trepidation slipping away, and started to hear my characters speak again. Trepidation? Yep. See, I'm in the last third... maybe the last quarter... of a piece of work that's been building in me for better than fifteen years. Now, I don't say that to create an inflated sense of the book's literary merit -- this is a light piece of science fiction, a coming of age story with a helping of innocence lost, not The Remembrance of Things Past. But yeah, I feel a…