“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut ... Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around."

– On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

I began my voracious and vociferous reading habit very early in life, as I owned every Dr. Seuss book and memorized and adored them all. As I got a little older and my mind's appetite grew, I went from A.A. Milne to the Hardy Boys' mystery books to H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Then, around 12-years old, I discovered the jaw-dropping stories that would change my life and free my whimsical, magical nature becoming my all-time favorite books: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I was off to the races looking for similarly-powerful artistic creations after that.

In my teens, I got into heavier, adult subjects like in Michael Crichton, Frank Herbert and Arthur C. Clarke's brilliant works, which then led to me finding my creative connection in the incredibly imaginative and diverse stories by Stephen King.

All of these authors broadened my horizon and blew my cravings wide open for any type of good, well-written story, which I found in the many varied works from Edgar Allan Poe to Harper Lee and from Tom Clancy to Homer. And, as my life has continued on, I've never slowed down, as recently evidenced when I was sidelined by major shoulder surgery in 2023 and couldn't do much but lie down on ice packs and hold a paperback with my other arm for the first two months, and I knocked out 22 novels in eight weeks (thank you David Weber, Eric Nylund and John Grisham).

Over time my hunger for reading morphed into a just-as-deep rapacity for writing, and I'm always jotting down and working on bits and pieces of things here and there as the stories call to me. I currently have several pieces of creative writing that are in various stages of length and completion that I am working on perfecting and polishing and I’ll eventually share them, here, on this site.

For now, though, I do have one story that I would like to present. It is just a little tale that is nonetheless near and dear to my heart. And my wondering thoughts are presented as a science fiction short-story with a philosophy narrative buried inside, because I can never really stop asking the childlike questions of "Why?" and "What if?" and “Who’s out there??”

"Compassion begets kindness;
Kindness begets respect;
Respect begets friendship;
Friendship begets love;
Love begets peace;
Peace begets compassion;"

– The Begets Loop (and the Kantak-Por Coding Rule One) derived from The First Principles, discovered in the Period Muustal-Past-Twelve

"Seventeen-partipten iterations. Seventeen," Jobanna sighed, sitting alone in her laboratory. She couldn't believe that she had made that many attempts at this. And, experienced the exact same number of defeats.

Taking a deep pause and trying to draw strength from the soothing hum of the powerful machinery in her office, Jobanna reassured herself that she was still giving it her all and trying everything possible – increasing array mutation sizes in the varied being models, decreasing personality type-casting constraints, brute-force computational environment analysis, constantly evolving thought efficiency algorithms ... even a wonderfully-original, true random-action seeder for specimen sequencing – and nothing had worked. Not once was her engineering sound enough, and not once was her effort successful enough to make a completely self-sustaining reaction in her attempts to prove Creation Perfection Theory – her life's work, and her utopian dream – that was first theorized after the discovery of The First Principles, oh-so-long ago. Seventeen-partipten times she had run her simulations, and they had failed, each and every one.

"Unbelievable," she sighed, again, finally letting the weight from that much futility conquer and fatigue her. Jobanna absently wondered if she was just overly dedicated, or overly crazy, and resigned herself to the fact that it was probably a lot of both. And, that most of her colleagues would agree.

By this point in the lives of her classmates, they had all succeeded in fairly decent ways. Some had even made noteworthy achievements, and had managed to add the honor of capitalization to their pronouns. But, none of their works were reality-shattering wonders, not like what Jobanna strived to create. Of course, right now, it really didn't matter how much, or how little, any of her contemporaries accomplished, though, because Jobanna had yet to actually succeed at anything – well, except at becoming obsessed with her theory of creativity, which seemed to have become her only reason for existence.

Jobanna's idealistic project started as just some crazy, dreamy theory she concocted in creationist philosophy engineering grad school – a truly daring idea, actually, based on coding theories proposed, yet, believed to be unobtainable, in The First Principles – that was so uniquely interesting and challenging that several of her most-talented classmates, and even a couple of tenured professors, had become infected with her passion and jumped on board to help her – at first that is, until they realized how truly daunting the task was – but, it had now become Jobanna’s mission, and her burden, alone. After all these eons, everyone had given up, except her; she was now the last surviving scientist on her crusade of hope.

Not wanting to lose herself in disappointing thoughts, Jobanna did her best to straighten her age-pronounced stoop, which also showed the weight she had defiantly picked up and placed on her own shoulders, long ago, and she glanced up at the six movements of the clock and cringed; it was half-past sixty-two-before-two-hundred in the morning. She was exhausted, and needed to go home and rest for what felt like a healthy couple-of-hundred-million years, but, she knew it would not be long until her passion called her back here, again.

Jobanna leaned over the lab's clean-room counter and hit the stop button on the matter/anti-matter initiation, randomization and containment gravity well, disappointedly shutting down her latest attempt to fill her soul. It seemed like such a waste of valuable proto-matter resources, and the always hard to procure quasi-time. "What a shame," she thought, after letting this one run unattended for almost fifteen billion years. That one planet, and that one species, had such potential. They almost had it. Almost.

Jobanna finally gave in to the fatigue of her failings and stood up, reached over and turned off the galaxies above her desk leaving only the fragmented illumination from the twinkle of her pet star, Sunny, sleeping peacefully in his bed of blue skies on her shelf, and walked with tired purpose out of her creationist office.

She'd try again, tomorrow, as she always did. Hopefully, she'd come up with some new, out-of-the-blue, brilliant idea that would prove a successful harmony of being, which she knew could exist. Maybe, then, she would balance The First Principles, creating Her perfect universe, where life is ruled only by compassion.