I write while I still can

People sometimes ask how I managed to publish sixteen books in two years, as if I’d suddenly turned into a machine. The truth is far less dramatic.

What I had was not speed so much as accumulation. I had twenty years’ worth of drafts and fragments sitting on a hard drive, pieces written in quiet hours when no one was looking. Pages half-finished. Ideas half-formed. Lines that waited years for the right home. I also had the kind of financial reality that teaches a person to be practical. Not “tight on money” in the abstract, but poor in the plain monetary sense, where hiring editors or illustrators is not a normal line item. It is the kind of luxury you do not even let yourself daydream about.

But I am Generation Jones, raised analog and adapted digital, and I learned how to make technology work for me.

I could not have shaped this much material fifteen years ago, or ten, or even five. The tools were not there yet. Now they are, and I use them. AI helps me edit. AI helps me illustrate. I describe what I need, refine what misses the mark, and keep moving. Some people will criticize that, and that is their right. But many of those same people have never had to choose between paying a bill and paying an artist. Necessity has a way of stripping theory down to its bones.

Still, the practical explanation is only part of the truth.

Underneath it is something deeper, something I do not always say out loud.

I was never medically able to have children. There will be no one carrying my name or my stories forward by blood. And over the years, I have watched dementia take pieces of the people I love—my mother, my father, my grandparents—until the memories that made them who they were began to thin and drift. That leaves a mark on a person. It changes the way you think about time. It changes the way you think about what remains.

I do not know what time has planned for me, but I know what it can do.

And so I write.

I write while I still can. I write because these memories, these observations, these small truths from a life lived in Iowa soil and Midwestern weather, are what I have to leave behind. I write because a life does not have to be famous to be worth recording. Ordinary people carry entire worlds inside them. Most of those worlds vanish quietly. I would like some part of mine not to.

This is my legacy.

Not a lineage, but a record. Not children, but stories. Not permanence, but the hope that someday, somewhere, someone will read a line I wrote and understand a little piece of who I was.