Year’s End, Big Thoughts

Things On My Mind as 2025 Ends

• It took me a while—47 years, if we’re being brutally honest—between the morning I told my mother over breakfast that I’d write a novel and the day I finally did. Stephen King once wrote that “the scariest moment is always just before you start,” and apparently, I took that to heart with Olympic-level commitment.
• If you want to understand the great social division tearing America apart, you don’t need a crystal ball or a pundit with a podcast. You need history. Good history. David Halberstam’s work on Korea and Vietnam lays bare how political divides shape foreign policy, often disastrously. Ken Burns’ documentaries—The Civil War, Baseball, The West, The War, The Vietnam War, The U.S. and the Holocaust,  and this year’s The American Revolution—show that the roots of our current fractures run deep. The rise of the MAGA movement isn’t a “mystery” unless you’ve skipped the reading list. As George Santayana wrote in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
• I’m not keen on folks who insist I don’t “work for a living” and that writing is just a hobby. True, I’m not at the Miami Herald or the Orlando Sentinel—the dream jobs of my optimistic twenties—so no, there’s no biweekly paycheck. But I’ve written and self‑published four books since 2012, including two this year. I’ve done my part: writing, editing, shaping, polishing, and putting my work into the world. As King says, “writing is refined thinking,” and I’ve done a lot of refining. Now it’s up to readers to buy, read, and review the fruits of that labor. My first book may be the runt of the litter, but even runts have their charm.
• Since we’re on the subject of writing, here’s the Big Lesson I learned from Reunion: Coda, a project that took a little over two years to complete: if your daily life is too chaotic, your responsibilities too scattered, and you can’t carve out real, protected time for your novel, then long‑form fiction may not be your bag. Discipline and time management were not my strong suits when I was younger—hence the 25‑year gap between Reunion: A Story (1998) and its follow‑ups, Reunion: Coda and Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen (2025). King puts it plainly: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” It took me a while to learn that lesson, but I got there.
• Conservatives, as a general rule, don’t like history—despite claiming to revere the glories of the past and yearning for the folkways and mores of the Land of Ago. What many right‑wing movements love instead is national mythology: the glossy, sepia‑toned version of events that conveniently omits anything that makes the dominant group look bad. History is complicated; mythology is comforting. And as any writer knows, comforting stories spread faster than complicated truths.