Some days it REALLY resists us.

On those days, there’s no shame in doing what football offenses do: Take what the defense will give you.

If our novel/screenplay/dance/comedy sketch won’t let us throw the deep ball that day, that’s okay.

Take the short pass. Take the dinks-and-dunks of three yards and four yards. 

In other words, if we can only scratch out two or three paragraphs of not-so-great stuff … take it. It’s progress. It’s a day’s work. It counts.

The important thing is to keep up our momentum day-to-day.

Tomorrow maybe the defense will give us more. For today, let’s take what we can get.

“Sometimes you gotta get ugly.”

The instant I heard that, I adopted it for my writing.

Sometimes the work ain’t pretty. Sometimes we’re staring at a scene or sequence that’s gonna kick our ass and we know it.

We gotta get ugly.

Forget Shakespeare. Forget Tolstoy. Get into the trenches and hammer out whatever trash we have to. Whatever it takes—good, bad or ugly.

It’s okay if it’s misbegotten. It’s okay if we wouldn’t show it to our mother.

The great thing about writing is it sits still till tomorrow. We can always revise. We can come back to it and make it pretty next week or the week after.

But for now, we must cast beauty and dignity to the winds. Hold your nose. Close your eyes.

Get in there and get ugly!

Jack Carr has James Reece.

Tom Clancy had Jack Ryan.

Ian Fleming had James Bond.

I have a lead character too. His name is Telamon of Arcadia. He’s a solitary mercenary of the ancient world. A bit like Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name,” only instead of a gun, his weapons are the bow and the sling, the sword and the spear.

Telamon has a problem.

For crimes committed in previous lifetimes, he has been cursed by heaven. His punishment is to live lifetime after lifetime, always as a soldier. He kills and is killed, over and over.

In Tides of War (2002), Telamon fought in the twenty-seven-year struggle between Athens and Sparta. In The Virtues of War (2005), he served Alexander, a hundred years later. In A Man at Arms (2021), he was a Roman legionary in Judea at the time of the Crucifixion.

In this new book, The Arcadian (May 2026), Telamon gets a chance to free himself from the wheel of his damnation.

The story takes place in 15th Century Spain, shortly after the discovery of the New World. A mysterious horse appears to Telamon. He recognizes it as his horse, when he served as a cavalry commander in the Tenth Legion of Rome, 1500 years earlier.

The horse bears the “X” brand of the Tenth Legion. The same mark, a tattoo, now appears on Telamon’s forearm …

Has this steed been sent across centuries to signal that Telamon has “served his time?” What must this haunted warrior do to lift the curse he has labored under for centuries?

This is the story of The Arcadian.

It’s a swashbuckler. I hope you’ll ride along with Telamon and me—and our mystery horse—as we cross the centuries, fighting for justice and adventure.

More to come in the weeks till pub date in late May …

Success is scary.

This was my own demon for years. 

Success is the next level.

It’s the high wire.

The Unknown.

Resistance afflicts us with butterfingers. We fumble away the prize we have run ninety-nine yards to achieve.

We try to recharge our will by flashing back to our original commitment, our dream, our vision. But these are so far behind us we can barely remember them.

As David Mamet says, “It’s hard to remember that you set out to drain the swamp when you’re up to your ass in alligators.”

Panic strikes.

The poster child for this moment is Christopher Columbus. He has sailed from Spain, certain that the earth is round and his westward course will carry him eventually to the East Indies.

But wait! Suddenly he’s out of sight of land. Nothing but blue water behind … naught but blue water ahead.

Suddenly Chris is doubting every principle he banked upon. What if the Earth really is flat? What if our ships plummet over the edge? What if we sail west forever and never reach anything?

See the common denominator in these first two Predictable Resistance Points? Both involve vision—bold, necessary vision—and both confront (imaginary) adversity.

Both call upon the individual, to remain true to, and act by, his own lights.

If you remember Hamlet’s problem, it was that he knew what he had to do—avenge the murder of his father, the king—but he kept rationalizing and making excuses for why he couldn’t make the fatal move. 

Not quite yet, anyway.

No matter how many provocations to action confronted Hamlet, the prince always found a reason to stall and “think” and “reconsider.” It wasn’t that he didn’t understand this failure. Remember his “To be or not to be” soliloquy? “ 

Thus the native hue of resolution 
is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought
And enterprises of great pith and moment
with this regard their currents turn awry
and lose the name of action.

Resistance strikes us first BEFORE we begin.

How many of us have collected “notes” and amassed “research” for that life-altering project we’ve always dreamt of tackling?

Resistance loves it when we “rehearse” and “prepare.” It knows the more we plot out our magnum opus, the less chance that we’ll actually work on it.

I have a mantra:

Start before you’re ready.

The idea is to outfox our fear-brain by stealing a march on it.

Don’t research. Don’t plan. Begin!

Fortunately, we’ve got a great mentor, the best we could possibly ask for.

Our own Resistance.

The dragon that guards the gold will be our instructor.

“The enemy,” as the Dalai Lama said, “is a great teacher.”

Let’s ask ourselves, then,

How will this enemy come at us? Where and when will he strike?

We have left the Known. 

We have entered the Unknown.

In this new world, we must change, not just superficially (in the sense of constructing our home office or setting up a Zoom studio and our own LLC) but on the deepest possible level, the level of the soul.