Luke Ford you aint. I got to tell you Mike that the tallent Ive seen you with in the past few years truely likes you.

I see it and at the shows everyone else sees it.

Being one of the few good guys left in this business is a rariety.

You wear it well.

So most of the time what you write isn’t art…which is okay, because the people who read your website aren’t looking for anything uplifting in the first place. No one ever expected you to be Dostoyevsky, or even Hunter S. Thompson for that matter.

However, there are those of us in this jaded little world who live and die by the printed page, who see the ability to string words and sentences together into a cohesive whole as a gift from the gods, who see Good Writing as something akin to a Holy Chore. You read and you read and you read, anything you can get your hands on, always looking for writing of superlative quality so that just a little bit of that genius might rub off on you when you sit down to write. Then, you write and you write and you write, always trying to pay attention, to not be lazy, to pull the plow and do the work with, as Balzac put it, “clean hands and composure”.

Sometimes when you’re writing you get close to what you’re trying to achieve. Usually, that’s not the case, but you reread it all later, have a sit-down with your internal editor (always looking over your shoulder, he is) and you try to learn from your mistakes and go on to do better another day. But occasionally — not often, not nearly often enough anyway — you find yourself writing over your head, producing good work at a level of quality you really had no right to ever expect you’d be able to produce.

That’s one of the reasons we do it.

That’s where you were when you wrote that yesterday.

Nicely done, bro.