On Writing

 The problem I find with writing longer projects is the following statement: "Time waits for no man" (or woman or child).

What I mean by this is people get sick that need caring for (possibly yourself or your significant other or whatever crisis or crises (your own or the world's shows up too). So, no matter how prepared you might be psychologically to write something often the real world comes in and changes all that.

However, the other way to look at this is what happens to you is also potentially fodder for what you are writing about.

For example, because I'm 76 years old I have a lot of knowledge (both political and scientific and world travel etc) because I have been so many places both physical locations on earth and met people from all over the world.

In other words I'm not the kind of person who stays their whole life within 25 miles of where they were born. Far from it my parents started moving me several times before I was 5 or 6 years old.

For example, I was born and lived in a 28 foot Aluminum Spartan Trailer on my grandfather's property while my father literally built an apartment on a hill under my grandfather's garage. For him the benefit of this was that he didn't have to put a roof on this apartment which is a lot of extra work because he could use the roof of the garage above us. So, then we moved into there in the apartment my father built for us. Then when I was 4 years old we moved to California away from Seattle and Washington where most of my relatives lived then. But, my father's sister lived in Glendale, California and she said the public schools were the best in Los Angeles then which they were. For example, my cousin got a scholarship to USC and another college full scholarship to NYU Law School and basically went to college and became a lawyer almost for free on Scholarships. He is still practicing Law in Orange County in California even now at age 81.

The point of what I'm saying here is that by the age of 6 I had already moved from the trailer to the apartment to Vista, California, to El Cajon California to Tujunga, California (and this was just the moves until age 6 when my parents became ministers of our Church in Los Angeles from 1954 until 1960.

So, world travel was a natural for me and moving wasn't seen as something bad but rather as something more normal than anything else.

But then I go to someplace like Nepal or India and ask someone how long they have lived in that location or area and I will get answers like "My family has lived here ongoing now for 1000 or 2000 years."

I don't know what to do with this kind of information because on one level it is too alien for me to deal with properly because of my experiences in my life. And the same thing might be true of you especially if you are a Californian because most of us travel a lot and have moved a lot as children and adults and met people from all over the world even just here in California. Because a lot of people from all over the world live here because Californians tend to be very tolerant of people in general and friendly to almost everyone all the time much more than anywhere else I have been on earth.

So, I guess the point I'm making here is that growing up a lot in California gave me a lot of raw information on every level so it kept me much more open minded about people in general all over the world than most places on earth tend to. And this helps me and has always helped me as a writer no matter what I'm writing about because of the rich and diverse life I have lived so far and at present I see no limit to how long any person can potentially live because of fast advancing medical technology.