Category Archives: Writing

Dump the Negative and Live The Life You Want.

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We see the darkness, it dances across our eyes. It pleads with our souls and steals our desire.

Within our lives we’re stuck living the life we don’t have, but the thing about being stuck, there’s always a way to get out of it. It takes force, it takes effort, but we have to get through our life, because why should we live life we don’t want?

There are zero reasons to stay in in a job you don’t like. There are zero reasons to live a life that you’re not enjoying.

But, there are things you must do, and a path you must follow.

The first step is clearing all the bad stuff from your life. This could be friends, family and the best way to get rid of these people is to ignore them.

In the social media world, you’re probably connected to people who you don’t talk to on a daily basis. You possibly see their posts on Facebook, Tweets, Snaps, Instagrams, but you keep seeing what their saying.

Their negativity is infecting your soul, filling it with rage, hate, anger and strife.

The faster you rid your life of them, the better you’ll life will be.

It won’t be easy, these are people you care about, but they are infecting your dreams. They’re stopping you from becoming great.

They’re limiting you to be the person you’ve been, when you see someone else you’d want to be.

You know the person, you see them your reflection, your future reflection.

Change your life and live that reflection.

How Progress Leads to Change, To Learning About Ourselves and Finally Discovery of Self.

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Progress and its many smaller side effects, change, learning and discovering lead to who you are.

Change matters to those who want a better life for those around them and when they discover the way to achieve change, no matter what is going on in their lives, they learn that it’s been worth it.

The smaller moments they’ve had, learning to be the people they’ve become, because with change we often need to learn how to deal with the changed people we’ve become.

Learning about who we’ve become and discovering all the processes that entails. From the way we handle those around us, to the need to let others know we are different and that we’ve become someone else.

Learning these things, discovering the intricate ways our brain has adapted to the changes and how we deal with these processes, that is where the real progress begins.

We progress as far as we can through change and learning, but discovery is where the major things happen.

In discovery, we find that things are better than we believed, and possibly more involved with the world than we believed as well.

Discovery leads our lives in a direction that will give us new life.

This life makes us better, stronger and more involved in who we want to be.

Being this person and knowing that we’ve worked hard to progress to that stage of our life, it gives us hope that others can change and within that hope we’ll begin to help others progress.

Discovery of self helps us be the person we were always meant to be and helps us define who we want our future self to be.

The discovery of self demystifies the world around us. Leaving us open to experience the beauty around us without thought of why it’s beautiful only knowing that it is.

Self Discovery, Las Vegas and New Adventures.

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It’s only after we’ve discovered who we are that we’re able to understand the trials and triumphs that led us to our current position.

When I arrived in Las Vegas nearly 17 years ago, I had no money, I’d recently been kicked out of the house by my father and stepmother and I didn’t have a job.

My big sister and her family took me in, something I can never thank them enough for. If not for them I would have been living on the street, which is something I considered when my father kicked me out of the house.

Vegas, at that time, was booming and skeletons of future hotels lined the strip. 

Jobs were abundant, but only to those who had experience in a casino related field, which I didn’t.

It was before the corporate takeover of Las Vegas, when employees were treated well and they were looked at as people and not a number on a spreadsheet.

Each year I’ve been in Vegas has brought something new.

The first year I married my wife, the second we bought our house, but children, it took us five years until we were blessed with children, but that didn’t come easily either, much like finding work now.

Our first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, but nearly a year later our son was born.

His life has been filled with all the things he could want, and possibly we’ve been too liberal with buying things, but when our daughter arrived 6 years later we learned how hard parenting could be.

Born 6 weeks early and weighing 3lbs 10 oz, she lived in an incubator for the first month of her life, but unlike some preemies, she’s been healthy otherwise.

Around the time our daughter was born, our life was in shambles. The economy crashed, we lost the house we’d loved, but everything has a silver lining, or so I’m told.

The house we’ve lived in since our daughter’s birth is bigger, but with that there were other things we were unable to do.

Somewhere along the way of being a good father and husband I forget to take care of myself and stopped caring about who I was and worried more about what others thought of me. This became evident last year when I suffered a breakdown and nearly took my own life.

For the past year I’ve been working on me and because of that I’ve tried to be better as a dad and husband.

When we leave Las Vegas I know I’ve made mistakes in the last 17 years, but for the last 16 months I’ve been trying to make up for those.

My journey of discovering who I am has been ongoing  for longer than I can say, but for little over a year I’ve come to grips with where I’ve screwed up and where I’ve prospered.

I’m looking forward to discovering more about who I am and who I’ll never be again. 

I’ll miss parts of our life in Las Vegas, but it’s time to start a new journey, a new life and see where the next adventure goes. 

Brian

How Fear Drove Me From “Finishing” a Novel

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Creating a world from nothing means eventually we have to show it to someone.

How we deal with their comments and whether we understand how they’re trying to help us is all on us.

One year ago, I had my cousin go over one of my stories. It’s a novel and I love the story, but having someone critique it, well, I guess I wasn’t ready for it.

I’ve thought about that story more recently.

The red sand, dancing pictures and who each character is have come to mean something to me and after a year of stops and starts on other stories, it’s time.

Each story is different for every writer, this one left me wanting to write more. I wanted to walk with them, discuss what they were doing and hear them ask, “Why’d you abandon us?”

My only answer, “Fear, I feared going back. Putting you on a table and cutting bits and pieces from who I thought you were and the thought of changing you, well, it scared the shit out of me.”

“But, we were supposed to go places, see things?”

“It’s only temporary. I’m ready to do the work, now that the writing is done it’s time to cut in, take things away and create something worthy of how I see you.”

“Okay, if that’s what you need to do. We’re ready too.”

This conversation may or may not have happened, the point is that a story we create, characters we live with for months and people we learn to love, sometimes we have to kill our darlings.

Killing them, gutting them and distributing who they are around the story, to make it better, that’s why I write.

The hardest part of writing is the killing, gutting and making the story into a cohesive piece of work, rather than an amalgam of what we think it should be.

The story, its characters, what their role is and how each puzzle piece fits into the story, that’s the important stuff, that is what makes us finish something and send it off.

I forgot that and now that I’ve had my discussion with the story, I’m ready to do the work, clean it up and send it off.

The Lie of Chasing Your Dreams

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Everyone is a creative and everyone dreams. But most people get to a point in their lives where they’re told, either by society, family or themselves, that they have to give up their creative aspirations and get a real job.

Those of us who’ve had this happen, and it should be everyone, have been lied to.

We’ve been told that what we want out of life isn’t as important as what society wants from us.

This lie permeates culture, rots dreams and destroys confidence.

This destruction causes all of us to second guess who we believe ourselves to be and reminds us that society has its own motives.

We must work for the machine. We must strive to make our country better, regardless of th damage it causes to ourselves and who we are.

Never give in to this machine. Be who you are. Create a life for yourself, create and dream.

We need less cogs in the machine and more framers of creativity.