I had just walked out into the sun­light after watch­ing “Iron Man 2”, which I thor­oughly enjoyed. I was still think­ing about the film, about heroes, about inspi­ra­tion, when I got into my car and turned on the radio. And I heard KT Tun­stall sing,

Sud­denly I see,

Why the hell it means so much to me.

Since com­ing out of my depres­sion, or at least break­ing out of the deep and start­ing back to the sur­face, I haven’t writ­ten much. I intended to write. I wanted to write, or at least I told myself I wanted to write. But some­thing was stop­ping me. I blamed it on my recent spate of injuries, which make it dif­fi­cult to sit for extended peri­ods — kids, pushups and crunches are your friends; you do not want to deal with pulled or strained core mus­cles — but that was just a con­ve­nient excuse. Some­thing else was stand­ing in the way.

When I decided to start writ­ing again — even if I didn’t actu­ally start writ­ing — it was with the inten­tion to forgo tra­di­tional pub­li­ca­tion. I would write my books for myself, and post them to Ama­zon, Smash­words, etc. only to mark them as “done” and quit fid­dling with them so I’d be forced to move on to the next book. Any­one who has writ­ten I book will know what I mean. In the­ory, I didn’t intend any­one to actu­ally read them.

And I think that inten­tion is exactly why I’ve been — remained — stalled. Books aren’t paint­ings or sculp­ture. It’s not enough that they sim­ply exist. Books must be read. The expe­ri­ence needs to be trans­mit­ted to read­ers. (I’m look­ing at you, Salinger.) Fun­da­men­tally, I knew all along that writ­ing just to write was a point­less waste of time for me.

I write because I want to enter­tain on my worst days, and inspire on my best. In order to do that, I need read­ers. I don’t nec­es­sar­ily need to know who they are, or even how many of them there are, and I don’t need to make my liv­ing as an author. In some ways, I think intend­ing to make my liv­ing as an author was one of the worst things I ever did, putting too much pres­sure on the writ­ing and suck­ing all the joy out of it. But the books need to be read.

I don’t know what this means yet. Thank­fully, I don’t need a plan right away. I still have a lot of writ­ing — and rewrit­ing — to do before I get to that point. But I know I’m not just writ­ing for myself. I’m writ­ing for you. And I want you to be impressed, enter­tained, and yes, inspired by the sto­ries I create.