Clear Air At Last?

The past several months have been painfully busy.  The last month has been especially excruciating.  The experience of entrepreneurship has recently seemed to me to be like being a skipper of a fishing boat caught in a gale, or like being a bush pilot for an air freight company whose clients suffer from permanently stormy weather.  However, my client backlog may finally be easing up.  I can hardly wait until I can once again start getting to bed at decent hours, resume exercising regularly, and take time to watch the sunsets.

During some of the worst moments, I found myself fantasizing about what my life would have been like had I become an author of short fiction instead of a technical professional.  The fantasies were triggered one morning at 4 AM while I was finishing writing a narrative and preparing CAD drawings for a schematic design report that was due at noon of the same day.  I hadn't slept since the previous morning.  As a bit of a distraction, I had taken a quick look at an Internet article about one of the crop of new young Chinese writers whose work falls loosely into the category of "magic realism."  The article showed a picture of this writer sitting at his desk while what looked like morning sunshine streamed through the window.  He was reading what looked like a book of ancient Chinese literature while he held a cat perched on one knee.  Both he and the cat looked vastly more relaxed than I was at that moment.  That got me wishing that I could be like Chen Chuncheng, Liu Cixin, Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, Ketty Steward, Yaa Gyasi, John Le Carre, and others like them who had actually found a way to craft an artistic career that pays the bills.  Ah well, one of these days ...

What I'd like to do all day.  In this picture, the computer actually has technical work on its screen, but let's just pretend that it really is displaying a short story or poem in progress.  The cat in this picture is mine ...