My first step is to formulate substance through letting my mind semi-unconsciously connect ideas, then I free write main points with some attempt at organizing them, and after that I examine them and play with them like a jigsaw puzzle. Then I reach the second step and write a first draft and try to identify unrelated, inaccurate, or repeated matter. My third step is to review and polish my writing after ignoring it long enough for me to be able to look at it through fresh eyes.

It was Tom Sawyer. I read it to myself when I was very young – the only book read to me was the Bible – and after reading that I started spending all my free time either running around in the woods, or sitting somewhere quiet and reading classics. I finally stopped myself from my classical literature addiction when I was thirty years old because I had spent almost my entire twenty-ninth year on this planet doing nothing but reading Balzac.

I seek a equatable subject matter from my library, set them all out together, and try to see the overlapping logic of their cover designs.

The Brothers Karamazov because it is the most polished book ever written.
Les Miserables because I find it so very interestingly epic.
The Red and the Black and The Picture of Dorian Gray because they hit a personal nerve.
And all of Nietzsche because he's like a breath of fresh air in the middle of a forest fire.

I do not let myself read for pleasure very often; when I do it is Kafka, Voltaire, Marcus Aurelius, or Plato.

I don't have one.

I wintered in Anchorage and spent my summers in Sacramento. I think that those two very different places helped make me aware that our core beliefs are influenced by the society that we are immersed in more that one may think... to belong to a society is to taint one's thoughts. I believe that it is necessary for a very small portion of humanity to have as un-tainted thoughts as possible so that they can perceive a society's thinking errors and bring them to everyone's attention.

Getting stuff out of my head is like taking off a heavy backpack; material bounces between my ears until I organize it and do with it what it is meant to be done with, e.g. shared, published, or thrown away as an investigated dead end.

I'm reaching people and maybe they will influence more people and then maybe I'll have made a worthwhile contribution to human evolution.

A less vague description of the changes this new era demands of us, i.e. precise directions.

Roses. A sublime vignette about a childhood pastime. I have never written anything better.