Crimson Sky Release Party, Part 3

(Crimson Sky on New Year’s Morn is my latest album, available for your listening pleasure on every conceivable streaming service. No, really.)

By the end of January, it became clear that I had started the year on a musical roll. I had written seven songs in a row since New Year’s Eve, all of which made it into the final lineup of a dozen songs. Then, on Feb. 1, for the first time in 2026, I started to write a song that sort of fizzled out. It happens, more often than not — in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever before composed seven decent tunes in a row.

I didn’t try writing on Feb. 2, and on the 3rd, walking toward my guitar stands, I said out loud, “I need a new song.”

In that moment of inspiration — or perhaps desperation — I conceived a song in the old folkie tradition of changing just word in each stanza to advance the message, and in a matter of minutes I had the words to the eighth “keeper” for my album.

Over the next week I plucked the ninth and 10th songs out of the ether, and on Feb. 9 I began tinkering with song order. I had several ideas for how to start the album and about which song could follow what.

But I didn’t have a candidate that would make a natural closing message. And so, being as literal as I had been the previous Monday, I took out my song notebook and penciled “Last Song” at the top of the page.

So what would be my encouragement to whoever might listen to these songs in order? What do I want to leave you with? That wasn’t terribly hard to figure out.

If this will be my last song, let me sing of peace and love,
Let it be a song of Jesus and blessings from above.
Let the words comfort the hurting and lift up tired souls;
Let the music sing of angels and wonders to behold.

So now I had 11 songs for the album. I spent a couple of days freaked out because I didn’t want “My Last Song” to be the last song I ever wrote, so I sat down on the 11th intent on writing a 12th song that would fit somewhere else. But that’s a story for another day.

Because writers write

Now I have two books in development. Last week I talked about my next collection of blog posts. I’m still organizing that one, but now I have given myself permission to take another collection off the back burner.

For three or four years, I have been tinkering with the idea of accumulating my thoughts about writing into a book, which has always had the working title Write anything until you write Something.

A couple of things held me back. First, there are oodles of books about writing; what good would it do to toss another one into that ocean? Second, I have published 17 books, and the next one to sell as many as 100 copies will be the first one. What can a writer with virtually no sales offer readers?

Recently I have returned to an old habit that I had been neglecting, a habit that is essential if a person wants to be a writer: I started reading again, and especially I started reading books about writing and the creative process. Last year I read only 31 books — it had been years since I averaged less than a book a week — and then I read only five books in the first four months of 2026. What especially got my attention was the zero books I read in March, but it took me another month to overcome the inertia.

I devoured five books in May and finished a sixth on June 1. This week I’m three-quarters of the way through a revisit of Elizabeth Gilbert’s wonderful book about a creative life, Big Magic, and Friday morning my brain exploded and I wrote the introduction to my book about writing.

Goes like this:

How dare I write a book about writing? Nobody has ever heard of me.

That’s not the point. I am a writer. I have been writing all of my life, and my life has been long by many standards. I have been alive longer than my father’s mother, longer than my older brother, and longer than my dear wife, all who were older than I was when the count began.

My point is that I was writing that whole time. I never stopped writing.

Because writers write. It’s our whole purpose — not to be famous, not to go down in history, not to make best-seller lists, but to write — to explore the infinite ways that words can dance, to find joy in the interplay, to delight in the play, to play as a child plays in the dirt, to make mud pies with words, to make the words sing with or without a melody.

To write anything until you write Something.

And once you’ve done that, to keep on writing.

The possibilities are endless

On Monday morning, new work week, new morning, everything seems possible. There’s a whole new week to complete the cycle again, and better this time. How do we maintain that fresh “Monday attitude”?

Why didn’t I think of this before (and maybe I did — memory is an odd thing)? The answer is simply to tuck the knowledge of what day it is away in a file. Don’t call it a “Monday attitude”; call it a “morning attitude.”

W. Somerset Maugham famously said, “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at 9 o’clock sharp.” But what if we release 9 o’clock from its deadline? Instead of “inspiration always strikes at 9,” let’s say, “inspiration always strikes.” Would I post more than once a day in my blog? Would I sit down at 7:15 p.m. and bang out a story?

The possibilities are endless. And OMG, what a big idea THAT is — the list of possibilities, the available options, goes on to infinity.

The possibilities are endless! With all due respect to the writer of Ecclesiastes, everything is not meaningless, everything is possible!

Dead ends do not exist. (OK, everyone dies, but only once!) If you’re lost in the woods, you have at least 360 directions you can take to try to find your way back to a path. Yes, some are better than others, but —

Everything is possible.

If one possibility doesn’t work out, try another — the possibilities are endless.