I had ended a three-year relationship with a woman that I had planned to marry. She had everything that I wanted: beauty, kindness, highly intelligent, financial stability, close knit friends and family, love of dogs. But something was missing. It wasn’t passion. Nor the connection. Or maybe it was those things, there in the beginning, then slowly seeped away like pinhole in a water balloon. I didn’t have the tools to fix our relationship. And the only solution was to end it.

And it pained me to do so for several years.

But something great came out of it. I had sunk myself into my new found passion, writing. Actually, it wasn’t writing as much as book one of the 7th Province: NIGHTFALL.

Thousands of my heart wrenching emotions helped fuel my main character’s emotions on paper. Losses that he goes through were better felt, understood. Of course, what I went through is nothing compared to his emotions, but without the breakup, I couldn’t have delved as deeply as I did. Tears was always a sign I was heading in the right direction.

Writing, however, requires some level of consistency. I have to sit down somewhere and write, be it on paper, computer, or imagination. Unfortunately, I’m a lazy person.

In my emotional turmoil, I had found a home away from home.

Borders café had become a place I could sit down from all the things that would tear me away from writing my book: TV, Internet, refrigerator, bed, couch, HGTV. OK. I was watching a lot of HGTV. OK. I still do. So to help focus myself and give me little excuse to do anything else, I bought a coffee or tea, glued myself to a small wooden table in the dark corner of the bookstore, and dove into the world of NIGHTFALL. Despite the babies crying, college kids laughing, soccer moms arguing, coffee beans grinding, and the constant frothing of lattes, I was totally undisturbed.

Time flowed by like a bunch of kids playing in the field with the warm sun shining.

I had spent thousands upon thousands of hours writing at Borders. People knew my name. I had seen cycles of baristas drift through like ghosts. Specialty drinks changed with the seasons. It was a safe haven for me to call upon my tormenting muse and write. My bliss.

Then there was a disturbance in the force, more aptly called, the Internet. Rumblings of Border’s financial troubles sounded through the grape vines. Months went by with nothing happening. Barnes and Noble fell into a similar predicament. They came up with a simple solution. They saw what Amazon was doing with the Kindle and created the Nook. It was a brilliant move and probably saved Barnes and Noble from bankruptcy.

Borders wasn’t so fortunate. They ignored the potential of e-readers. Their predicament became worse. They had dug themselves into a black hole by acquiring too many stores. Cut back their closing time from eleven PM to ten to nine. This forced me to change my schedule so I could still write. Reducing the hours did nothing to save them. So they heeded their competitors and came up with their own e-reader, the Kobo. Did it work? Kobo is a monetary unit of Nigeria. Not sure if that was a great choice.

News ebbed that Borders was going to close down low performing stores. I had no problems with this. I doubted my Borders would be closed. Border’s parking lot was always full. Except after closing but that’s obvious.

One day I had walked in and I saw this:

A few days later, I’d found out my Borders was closing and they had let go of all their baristas. An era had ended for me. My home away from home was leaving. My tormenting muse had no use for me. Simply put, I had gotten over my old flame. With it the completion of NIGHTFALL, four years in the making.

Borders may have been a conglomerate, but this Borders became my refuge. I, for one, am grateful. Thank you.

It’s funny how art mimics life, or how life mimics art.  The hero of my book has compulsions that seem to border on anger.  And it’s no surprise my compulsions border on anger.  Artists have issues.  One of the best ways to work them out is to put it into art.

Do you work at the US Mint?

I was waiting for a free table at my favorite place to write, Borders. And I overheard a high school student asking a grad student about working in the financial sector.  The grad student had financial looking books on the long table.  He said that if you worked for this certain company doing this certain kind of trade, you’d make a lot of money.

Something inside me wanted to jump up, slap the grad student across the face, and take the high school student, shake him, and tell him to follow his passions.

If that’d happened, then I’d be writing this post in jail.

The more important question was why did I react this way. And why do I react this way when I hear people say, “Do this and you’ll make lots of money.” Or the more infamous, “I’ve created a system that will create fast, easy money, bring you girls from all over the world. See this car I’m driving? Would you like to drive this car?” Then in faint, white fine print ‘Results may vary. Results not typical.’  The kind of fine print that not even Sherlock Holmes could find.

As I was waiting for a table, I checked through my unread emails and came across a newsletter from Michael Neill. Check him out. He’s awesome. He wrote about the difference between earning money and making money.

Aren’t those two the same?

The only people in America that make money are the people who work in the US Mint. The rest of us earn money.

The earning part is where most people don’t understand.

I was talking to a friend yesterday and he’s helping his close friend produce some videos. My friend said he knew how to get free actors. We laughed because actors would work for free just to get their faces and names out there. But these actors are on to something. They’re putting the work in, serving others, with the hope that it’ll pay them back.

To start a fire in a fireplace, you must give it wood. This wood is the service you give before you can get heat, the payback.  Life is full of dualities.  Giving and receiving are two sides of the same coin, the yin and yang, complete opposites that work with each other.

Will I make money from my books? No. Unless I use the pages to print money. But that would be a big no no.

My job as a writer is to write the best book that I can write, to write the story given to me, and have fun doing it.  I’ve put my soul into it.  As the fame photographer Rodney Lough has said, art is the language of the soul.  Everything else follows.