Until you have done it…

how can you ever know what it is like to build something from nothing?

Imagine sitting down in a trailer on some remote field, where the afternoon presses on the roof until the surface expands, creating ripples in the cheap white paint. Outside, crickets keep their steady saw and the birds trade calls across the tree line, and that is the entire population of your world — not a voice, not a face, not a car on the private road. Just the fan pushing warm air around and the bright rectangle of a laptop screen in a tiny trailer, and dust floating gracefully in ribbons of light pouring through the window.

That kind of quiet is a gift when the creative juices are flowing and there is nothing but the rhythm of your fingers tapping keyboards. Hours vanish. You look up and the light has gone gold, then gone entirely, and you have not eaten, and you do not care, because the thing in your head is finally coming out in the right order!

Some days, though, you poke your head out and call — and the crickets keep sawing, and the birds keep on with their business, and no one answers you. That silence can be quite dreadful.

I have had many kinds of quiet for the last three years of research and development. It hums, it hollows, but it is never the same. The next day builds and adds to the composite of knowledge/revisions/introductions/challenges/belly laughs/memes from the days before it…