I was sitting outside the Barn Restaurant at Sovereignty Ranch, my writing partner Kaya beside me, on an August afternoon with the breeze coming down off the hills. I typed the last line of I'Eternal, sat back in my chair, and thought about the last four months.
I wrote a draft of this book in 2023. Roughly 250 pages, and the story was not there. I put it down, and Adi challenged me to write a book with a female protagonist, and Quietudewas born.
This spring I'Eternal came back around, and this time the story had a new heartbeat. When I finished, for the first time with any book I have written, I felt deep sadness to let the characters go. They no longer belonged to me.
The first draft is done, and every sentence that needs refining will still be sitting there in September.
People hear finished and think finish line. Completing a draft is the first honest piece of the work and nothing more. It proves the thing can exist outside your mind. The rewrite is what turns it into a book people carry with them long after they close the last page.
So I am putting it in a drawer for a month. No notes, no tinkering, no reading one chapter to see if it still holds up. Adi and I are splitting the summer between the island and the ranch, and I plan to spend those weeks bussing tables and bartending at the Barn with the manuscript nowhere near me. When I open it again, I want to be a stranger to it. A stranger catches what the author defends.
Nobody warns you about that part. You cannot see a thing clearly while you are still standing inside it.
You have something like this. A manuscript, a business plan, a move across the country, a conversation you have been rehearsing in the truck for two years. The version in your head is flawless and permanently out of reach. It stays that way until you put a clumsy one into the world where the light can get at it.
Write the bad one first. Give it thirty days of silence. Come back with new eyes and make it good.
Your dream is not waiting on your talent. It waits on your willingness to finish something imperfect and then let it sit.
The world is waiting for you to share your gifts: go make it happen!
You come up the caliche road with the windows down and the dust runs out behind you. The hill sits where it has always sat and the light works down the face of it all evening. Nobody built that and nobody improves on it. The live oaks keep the shade close to the ground and the cattle find it by ten in the morning. A hawk works the fence line and hurries about none of it. You cut the engine and the country comes back in around you, cicadas first, then wind in the cedar, then a pump ticking at the tank below the rise. The phone finds no signal out here and you quit reaching for it after the first day. In the evening the grass goes gold and the clouds come up pink behind the far hill and the whole thing holds still for about eleven minutes. People call this God's country and they are not being clever. They mean something older than the deed is running it. You stand there with a cold ice tea sweating in your hand and you understand why a person would spend a life within sight of one hill.
Everyone carries a story worth telling. Most people never learn how. In my master course, I teach you the four questions every great story turns on. Who stands at the center of it. What sets the whole thing moving. Where it all takes place. Why any of it matters to a stranger. Learn these four and the stage is yours, whether you are writing a speech, filming a vlog at your kitchen table, or building something the world has not seen yet. The voice is already yours. Let me show you how to use it.
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I’ve spent most of my life onstage, telling stories for laughs and feeling a room shift in real time. For twenty five years I hosted an improvisational show called Four Day Weekend, and that stage felt like home. In 2020 the world shifted, and so did I. The questions of the world began to matter more to me than comedy, and I turned toward writing about life's greater mysteries, finishing We’ll Always Have Paris and later Quietude, which became a quiet turning point in my life. Exploring The 12 Universal Laws widened the lens even more. Now the island reflections and everyday synchronicities I share carry one intention, which is to help you awaken to your highest potential. I am not here to convince or impress you. I simply hope to brighten your day, invite you to question what you have been told, and remind you of what you already know. Each morning I return to the same ground. I am awake. I am aware. I am able. I remember. Everything I share grows from there.