I was considering Thankfulness yesterday, and my thoughts spiraled into reflections on what I want to be doing with my life. My highest priority is providing a good home for my wife and her menagerie. Then there’s writing. And now I have the opportunity to build an airplane of my own, something to keep me sharp as I cross into the latter half of my 60’s. My health is good, and there are years ahead of me.

But what I’m doing now is checking Twitter and Bluesky, and watching clips on YouTube. I haven’t worked seriously on my current novel in weeks. I haven’t flown in over a year because I don’t trust rental airplanes.

John Scalzi recently compared the different social media platforms to the different tables in the high school cafeteria: the tech nerd table, the popular girl table, and so on. To me, the essence of that comparison is not the tables but the cafeteria itself: noisy, discordant, and in the end unsatisfying. For every delicious tidbit, there are steaming pots of limp pasta and overcooked kidney beans. For every creative soul, there are busloads of dreary cultists and aimless sheep. Social media is nice for keeping up with the creators I know, but it invariably exposes a horrifying panorama of human drama, foolishness, and suffering.

So it’s time to focus on being the person I want to be. I’ll post here as interesting things happen in my life and announce them on Bluesky, but I won’t be present otherwise. I won’t delete the Twitter account, but this will be the last thing I put there.

The last novel didn’t sell, but the next one might. Building my own airplane will give me something I can trust because I know it inside and out. And it’s time to go downstairs and help Meg with Thanksgiving.

My last post is no longer here. It was supposed to be mildly amusing. It was supposed to say something about how sitcom writing in the 1960s and 1970s affected my own “writer’s journey.” But it was forced, and the more I re-read it, the more tortured it felt. I was trying too hard to be funny, and that always produces the opposite result. As one of my editors said, “This sentence is so tortured it should be put out of its misery.”

So that’s today’s lesson: There are sentences that cannot be saved. There are blog posts that aren’t good enough. There are days when the little voice in my head is right.

[Update: I don’t want to scare anyone into thinking it takes four years to learn how to fly. It took me that long for other reasons. Normally it takes from 2 to 12 months, depending on your availability and the weather, with 60-80 hours in the air.]

After four years of lessons, including a long interruption from covid-19, I finally earned my private pilot certificate! Traditionally I should write something profound about flying, but in the end it wasn’t about conquering the air. It was about conquering myself. I often study a new interest but don’t actually do anything with it. I buy a book or two. Maybe I dabble for a while. Then I move on to something else. This time around, I quit taking flying lessons twice (besides the break for covid-19), but I went back each time. Getting the certificate became an exercise in ignoring the shoulder angels who whispered that flying was too difficult.

Aviation has taught me confidence and humility in equal measures. By nature, I’m not adventurous. I’m not interested in flying blind in the clouds, relying on instruments to keep myself upright. Give me a nice day with high clouds and I’ll fly a few thousand feet up, enjoying my life and the view of the world below. That’s enough for me, because the shoulder angels aren’t wrong. The paradox of human flight is that if you listen to your fears, you’ll never leave the ground, but if you ignore the quiet doubts, someday you’ll become a cautionary tale.

And now that the mental pressure is off, I can turn my attention back to another ambition. I have a novel out for querying. While the responses dribble in, I’ll get back to work on a couple of short stories that have been languishing. There are some earlier novels that need significant re-writes and some sketches that need to grow into real books. In the past four years, my flying skills got better and so did my writing. It’s only a matter of time before something gets published, as long as I don’t quit.