I like to write. It's true.

No really, I do.

Seriously. I do. Why won't you believe me?

Writing isn't work. It's a habit. It's the crawl space of my mind; writing feels snug, like the stretch in a new pair of socks.

Years ago, an executive on my team offered, 'I write better than I speak' - an idea which I've now absconded with and taken as my own.

Ideas to write about resolve like cars on an eight-lane freeway. Sometimes there's a stream of them, boxing each other out, competing for the speed of the left lane. Sometimes the idea highway feels like three AM, lit up by overheads, but sparse of any traffic at all.

I write to publish every week, a nasty case of the 10,000 hours. It's partially to exercise the muscle, but mostly because it's a calendar I can count on. It's rhythm, whether the writing is good or bad, whether I have time or not.

Most weeks I work up a piece on Saturday, first thing in the morning, a dented and malformed cast of a thing. Editing is really the art, because the first pass often looks like raw clay misshapen on a potter's wheel. It needs spinning and water; it almost always requires the removal of extra clay.

Often - at the start - there isn't even clarity as to whether the finished product will be a vase or a bowl: It's just words to an answer I hadn't even recognized needed questioning.

It took decades to realize I write best in short form. Essays to some, preambles to another. Occasionally a few pieces string together in multiple parts, as if a term paper and I believe you'll value it by its heft.

Some pieces hide and need to be woo'd into daylight. Others - like this one - come fully formed, as if I'm a vessel and the piece has been stuck in its depths, only to emerge once squeezed like a bottle of ketchup or uncorked like fine wine.

Generally, I don't speak stories in my head (we've already discussed this, so you should know all about it. If you don't, I'm moderately offended), but in the act of writing, there are flavors of actors.

There's the heady businessman (the one you've seen holding smoking broccoli, a one Eskanley Duplita, the world's greatest executive coach); there's the jackass doing nitrous, and the dreadlocked prep school hippie on the Phish or Grateful Dead lot - these a few among other pundits, jesters and fools.

Lately, I publish on Tuesday's, on the regular. A fact no one notices but me because, well, because it's my schedule, and it's not a thing you set your clock by.

<shuffles foot in dirt, pouts and looks up at you with lost doggie eyes>

Oh yeah, there's this thing: If it's in (), it's a natural parenthetical aside - but if it's <> it's me talking to me about what I'm talking to you about. Why? I don't know, it's just how the voice tells me to do it.

<dude, get it together, you're blathering, no one cares>

Anyway, I find punctuation a sort of game. I love semi-colons, so throw them around like tassels on a blanket; or dashes - because it's a sport to speed up or slow down the reader's flow.

When I publish pieces, vanity looms like a hairy beast in the shadows. Monday may find me giddy with potential, yet by Wednesday - if a piece has little interaction - my subconscious curls into an Armadillo's ball.

And so, now I write on the regular.

A piece a week.

Every week, for nearly four years.

_{(Fact: the first three years I wrote privately, solely to Flipside Employees, in a slack channel called Friday CEO Notes.}

_{Yes there are some bangers in there, yes some dished dirt on individuals in a way that will require another five or ten years for them to see the light of day, once all of the scoundrels have moved on, or the CIA has stopped listening.)}

Anyway, most of this is to tell you that, well, I guess I write this way because I'm lazy.

200+ pieces in the can and that means - wallah! - there's enough material coming together for a book I don’t have to write sometime later. Sure, I'll put a snappy fresh-feeling forward on it; and I'll curate the top 80% of the bottom 90% so there'll be more of the wheat and less of the chafe. And then I'll market it as something for your coffee table or bed stand or meditative beach read.

I also disclose this mostly so that my wife doesn't get upset, like the time a few years back when I let her brother know I was publishing a book, this before she even knew I had put words to paper.

Still in the doghouse on that one, so - lovely wife of mine - consider this fair warning.

And to the rest of you, feel free to allow the waft of excitement to fill the air.

Sniff away, sniff away.

And know I'll still be here writing when you get back.