How many of you like puzzles? Or a good board game? I woke up this morning, to my son’s excitement over his progress at solving a 5 by 5 Rubik’s Cube. He had completed the center portion of two sides, as see in the image I included here. Seeing his progress and his excitement over it, got me thinking about the challenges we all face in life. Some of us really like puzzles, and some are good at them.
I like a good puzzle, whether that is playing a game of chess with my son or trying to solve a new task at my full-time job. Puzzles and challenges are everywhere. At other times, the puzzle could be something in a story I’m outlining or writing.
Some really hard puzzles take time to solve. They may take more than one attempt to solve. If I tried to solve the 5 by 5 Rubik’s Cube, I’m sure I would fail many times before I succeeded. Like the challenges in life, we may grow frustrated with our inability to solve them. But like the challenges we face in life, success only comes when we take consistent action, persevere in our attempts, and have patience when we fail.
Puzzles and challenges will always be around. Some are much more difficult than others. Some are easy. Some are so complex they cannot be solved. Even if the puzzles cannot be solved, it doesn’t mean nothing can be learned from trying. In the same way my young son teaches himself to solve Rubik’s Cubes of varying designs, I’ve learned, through my own challenges, to be consistent in my actions, persevering through my failures with patience.
One set of puzzles or challenges I have been working through these last few weeks is my next book. It is a book that revolves around the accidental ability of time travel and how to maintain control of it. It’s like pushing a hose. Just to make sure I maintain the continuity of the story, I have created a rather large spreadsheet to keep track of the locations, times, and actions occurring through the book. I’ve got it almost ready for my beta readers to review and pick apart. I’ll have that book ready by the end of March.
One of my goals for this year is to have a good, polished, book ready for Amazon each quarter. Keep watching my website for details on upcoming books. Thank you to any of you that picked up copies of my free Kindle books last week (Demons of a Dead World and The Threads Unbound). I hope you enjoy them and come back for more of my books.
DANIEL R. BURKHARD 