Life is movement. And because we are part of this magnitude of movement called Life, we continue to move every morning, get out of bed and begin to do your routines. Otherwise, if we are dead, how can we do this routine? Just do not compare yourself to others or you will begin to feel bored. I have no motivation for getting out of bed every morning. This may sound robotic, because humans have reasons why they are what they are.

On the other hand, because we connect our actions to some form of causes why we do what we do, we thought we are not robotic because we are human beings that feel. We attached our reasons to something more: motivations. And motivations turned into keys to start the human robots to moving, working, but not thinking because it was programmed with certain human-like files. Thinking is human activity.

There is only one thing that surely and seemly motivates me for NOT getting out of bed: the cold mornings of February month. Sleeping and cold weather enough to move you into another bout to sleeping. Sometimes when my cat pet calls for me outside my bedroom door at six in the morning, i am motivated to get out of bed to feed it.

Interactions do not necessarily mean with people. It also is an animal commnucation and interaction. So many reasons to be morivated to begin the day in a happy mood, or in a peaceful mood. However when all sorts of motivations were performed and accomplished and you were still alive, we certainly ask ourselves: what else would motivate me to start the day? This is the trouble with a robotic mind. Because we were used to do the same thing everyday, once we lose interest, it would be difficult to rise out of bed in the morning. Inspirations also pushed us to move, a sort of desire to accomplish something for the day. If not, we look for motivations or inspiration. Not bad though. That idea is repeating and repeating…only.

I say we must be open to all possibilities. Even if we think and believed that we had exhausted all possibilities, we will not live longer if we have not used up the energies for those purposes assigned to us when we were born in this world. Each individual has a particular role we play which is the accomplishment of our development as human being. If you think you have accomplished all, the reason why you may seek for motivations to perform everyday routine, (a task we thought unaccomplished as yet,) but we seemed to be exhausted that we cannot get out of bed every morning…this is a clear indication of boredom.

So, when you reached that stage in your life, do not struggle to change your boredom. Why force yourself to get out of bed each morning when you were still activated by your existence? You can wait until your natural energy propels you to move and rise up from bed. Do not depend on motivations because somehow, your reason for fighting that boredom was exhausted, that you think you had lost your reasons for moving. That is not the case. Let that inspiration move within you. And you will discover that living was a new-found reason for getting out of bed each morning.

Networking
Physical exercise
Spend Time With Friends and Family

If I write about topics that I don’t have any ideas, then the first thing I need to do is to familiarize the topic. I need words to write an article and if I am not familiar with that topic, research on it, that’s what I do. I write articles for my client with topics that I have no clue about. Doing research first before I work on my own words for the articles helps me a lot to create contents which are at least presentable

I'm sure this wasn't the first book I ever read---but when I was seven or eight, my uncle, who every Christmas went to a bookstore and asked for two books appropriate for a child my age, gave me a book called Bertram ad his Fabulous Animals---and also a beautifully bound copy of Grimm's fairy tales' read both of them many times over. In my mind I can still visualize the illustrations---I'm now 61 years old.

1. Find inspiration and ideas for my cover2.
2. Choose my cover design software
3. Find free images or I use Shutterstock
4. Decide on my cover’s dimensions
5. Get typography right
6. Make sure I export the correct files
7. Test my designs

My list of favorite books is always changing and so below is my list as of this minute:

1. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust - I first read it when I was 14 but didn't really come to appreciate the gravity of this book, it's far-reaching influence on literature and its transcendental lyricism, when I read it again 3 years later. For Proust, the apparently trivial is an invariable opportunity for scrutiny, examination, and analysis. He is at once the most intellectual of all novelists; and if asked now to select only one novel that expresses the height of literature, it would be this monumental reverie on memory and art.

2. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow - There's much talk about various novels being “ The Great American Novel”. The list would include The Great Gatsby, Absalom Absalom!, Invisible Man, An American Tragedy — but the one I think that shall stand the test of time is this one right here. Look no further! The unimaginably potent blend of Bellow’s incredible verve and range, intellectualism and spiritual restlessness, so American and yet so moral, makes this book the definitive American masterpiece.

3. The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James - Not so much a novel as it is a novella, but an incontestably great testament to The Master’s technique and intellectualism. The book is even more meaningful if you view it as a commentary on James’s solitary life owing, by and large, to the dedication to his art. On his deathbed, it is said, people had to wrestle the pen away from his grip, his hand still twitching.

4. Middlemarch by George Eliot - I come back to this book it seems every other year, and my feeling is that it is the best novel written in English, hands down. Eliot writes about high and low life as though nothing human is foreign to her.

5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky - For all the existential dread in circulation these days, I feel like one learns more from a page of this book than any of the full works of Camus, Kierkegaard, or Sartre.

All these are works of fiction but that's only because they're the ones that first jump out to me. I love fiction — it is the only form of lying I find utterly necessary and moral. As far as non-fiction goes, some titles worth mentioning are Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, and Why The Heavens Did Not Darken by A.J. Mayer.

I read a very good book by a man named Chade-Meng Tan called Search Inside Yourself.

The title is very corny, but the book itself is excellent. It’s all about how to practice mindfulness in every day life, and the benefits of mindfulness meditation.

I had two strategies:

I would add little sticky index tabs to the top of the pages so I could find the pages of interest quickly.
I would create my own notebooks, where I rewrote the ideas presented in the book using my own language. This made sure I had a solid understanding and made it easier for me to remember the contents.
I used this on a non-fiction book, but if it were fiction you were reading, I think you could use a similar technique.

I would also add that I am skeptical of any advice that says reading two books a week would be beneficial. You should read when you want to read, and enjoy it when you do. You should never be under pressure to read X number of books per week.

Reading is a hobby, not a labour.

I remember poking at storytelling a few times when I was young, and my mother said I told all sorts of (creepy) stories since the time I could talk, but…it was erratic and never went anywhere. Unless it was for a class—I know I wrote (& illustrated) a cute little story for one class because I still have it.

But when I was age 8 or 9, I was introduced to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and to Star Wars and Star Trek: Voyager (newly started) shortly thereafter. The former in particular spawned an elaborate daydreamed fanfic that essentially predicted Section 31 and entire Undine thing showing up in the Star Trek Online game, which is set a few decades after Voyager. My fanfic daydreams didn’t use those terms, of course, and I connected things a bit differently, but it filled the same plot holes. (I find it amusing that I, as a child that young, had made an assumption that filled the huge plot hole in the first episode of Voyager…it took me a few years to realize that the show’s writers actually hadn’t meant or said that.)

Anyway, that daydream continued for years. It got incredibly complex and convoluted, and I was forgetting more and more of the foundation, to the point that daydreaming was often upsetting. “X happened again! But who resolved it last time? How? Why do they have to contact Y? What’s important about her? Why can’t I remember?!”

The summer after I turned 14 (I have a May birthday), I had a dream, that developed into an original daydream. Because of how I was failing to remember details in my fanfic daydream—not that I knew the term “fanfic” yet—I thought I’d better write this down!.

So I started writing my story. The original chapter 2 was more in line with what I write now, but I looked at it, felt uncomfortable—probably in part due to how family would react if I saw it—so I started an alternate chapter 2, to send the story in another, more “acceptable”, direction.

That same month, my family hosted some folks for lunch, and 14-year-old me had to entertain an 8-year-old. I looked around my room full of books and not much else (besides some crochet/knitting/braiding stuff), and I said “Well, I started writing a story recently. Want to hear it?” (I gave her the alternate of chapter 2, which became the canon as I built the rest of the story.)

That 8-year-old girl was my first cheerleader, as a writer, as was her mother.

That 8-year-old girl also started pointing out problems in what I was writing. (That ensured my writer’s ego was incredibly short-lived.)

Writing that story—which overtly had Christians in it—made me feel rueful that God didn’t fit in either the Star Trek or Star Wars universes. It also made me wonder why God couldn’t be in a space opera—not that I knew the term “space opera” at the time, but I digress.

One day, we were at some kind of Christian bookstore, and I spotted the covers for Kathy Tyers’s Firebird trilogy, as released by Bethany House Publishers. I stared at it, thinking the cover looked like the same kind of story as a Star Trek or Star Wars, but it was in a Christian bookstore! Huh?!

Bought them, gobbled them, pinched pennies to collect every original title the author wrote…including the original version of Firebird, back when it was a duology released by a mainstream “secular” publisher.

In comparing that duology to the trilogy, I learned an important rule of revision: Keep the parts you like & don’t worry about the rest.

What I’ve failed to mention is, between this time, I was in high school. In my freshman year of high school, I was continuing that first original daydream…and my classmates were reading it. On school field trips, I even had their parents coming up to me and commenting on my ability.

(That first story has some core problems that mean it may never see the light of day in any form, though I do have an idea for a complete rewriting from the perspective of one particular character…which would make it a dystopia/humor. I’ve shared some sample chapters before, and it can have the target audience on the floor in laughter.)

My other three years of high school—which were at another school—I started other stories, some fanfics (primarily Star Wars), some original… I finished one original story in particular that had a classmate raving about how she never read fantasy—she hated Tolkein and Narnia and other fantasy—but she loved mine. That particular one became the first in my Chronicles of Marsdenfel.

There have been other influences, but those are the ones I’m most directly, most clearly, aware of.

If we are in a simulation, could ever know for certain? If the simulators don’t want us to find out, we probably never will. But if they choose to reveal themselves, they could certainly do so. Another event that would let us conclude with a high degree of confidence that we are in a simulation is if we ever reach a point when we are about to switch on our own ancestor simulations. That would be very strong evidence against the first two propositions, leaving us only with the third.

The origin of life is the biggest unanswered question in biology. Evolution explains the origin of all species once life has started, but there really is no good theory that explains exactly the steps that created life on earth. There is the RNA world hypothesis which supposes that before life was based on DNA and proteins, the world only had RNA which acted as both a replicator and an enzyme. But there really is not good theory that explains how you go from a soup of amino acids and nucleotides to a cell wall enclosed RNA world living organism. The transition from RNA to DNA is also not clear.

PS: I am NOT claiming that we need a "creator" or god to explain the origin of life. I am sure there is a natural non-theistic solution to the problem but we just don't really understand the mechanism behind the origin of life at this point in time.