The Idea I Thought Was Mine
Here One Moment. Secret of Secrets. Machu Picchu. Wiffle Ball. Cardinals Predictions. Way of Excellence. And Obsidian.
Passengers on a short flight in Australia have an unsettling experience in “Here One Moment.” An ordinary-looking woman stands, moves through the cabin, and quietly tells each person the cause and date of their death.
Heart Failure.
Fifty-five.
Fate can’t be fought.
The flight lands, everyone goes their separate ways, but the predictions begin haunting the passengers’ lives. Yes, some come true, and the news spreads online like a spark landing on dry brush. The scene is gripping; one of the best I’ve read.
The novel then follows several regular folks with jobs, family, young and old grappling with whether to believe said random prophecies. This one moment changes relationships, impacts choices, and contemplates whether knowing your fate is a gift or a curse.
Liane Moriarty wrote a beautiful book. And a frustrating one because, damn it, this was my idea.
Hundreds of people claim they had the same idea first; go watch the Social Network. Those hulking Winklevoss twins settled in court over the ordeal. Me? I’ve never met Moriarty. She lives on the other side of the world.
But I do have receipts! I put pen to paper years ago. I’m a slow writer. Deliberate even. This stems from too many side projects, household duties, and, well, that day job.
It also shows that your ideas aren’t unique. Execution does matter. If you’ve read anything on this site, you pick up I love Dan Brown. He’s the pinnacle of grabbing an idea and building a thriller around said concept. The Da Vinci Code,considered blasphemous and revolutionary in the late 90s, wasn’t an original idea. Numerous papers and academic books had been circulating suggesting Jesus might have fathered a child with Mary Magdalene.
Nothing new. Heck, Dan Brown was accused, sued, and found not guilty for stealing the idea. I love his books. If I had to rank, Inferno is my favorite. But the latest, which I reviewed weeks ago, I’ll stand by my disappointment. Still, he’s committed to his process, bringing real-world edge theories to the page. In his latest, the magic of society is that we are subconsciously interconnected. If we’re all receivers, constantly picking up signals from each other, that could explain Facebook’s rapid rise; why we’re all going crazy on the political front.
We do share a connection. Which means we share ideas too—sometimes the exact same ones. The mystical muse might be a thing.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that an Australian writer and I had a similar idea. No, our books are not similar in execution. She ran circles around me. Neither is the plot. But we essentially shared the same concept. I suppose we can shout spoilers, but my short story has been in the wild for more than a minute. The essential question: What would you do if you knew the exact day you would die?
Or what’s known in dark circles as The Day Life Breaks. It’s a brutal question that cuts to how one spends their time. Would your answer change if that day is in forty years? Ten? Or what about next week? What would you do? What questions would you ask yourself? Here are a few; the kind that nag at all hours once they burrow into your head:
Am I spending enough time with my kids?
Should I be burning the midnight oil at work?
What about those unused vacation days?
What should be written on my tombstone?
Where do I stand with the almighty?
Who do I owe an apology to? Am I waiting for them to go first?
Who have I been performing for instead of being present with?
Do I have any roads not taken?
What about the hike to Machu Picchu?
Would I run this life back the same way, knowing what I know?
The Day Life Breaks Conundrum
Lordy, it’s easy to run yourself in circles debating life. As the great Captain America would say, ”I could do this all day.”
For my lead character, Elliot, he lived a negative life, always thinking the world was out to get him or worse. It sort of was, I guess. I think that’s why I struggled to reach the finish. Not on paper, but when I was supposed to be sleeping, finding myself staring at the ceiling fan wondering if I’d been spending my days on the right projects. You leave yourself on the page, and the page changes you back. One lives the life they live from the beginning. This made me hop on the nostalgia train again—back when winning and losing were simpler, measured in plastic balls and backyard bragging rights.
Games of Sport
When I was a kid, I played a number of sports. Baseball. Football. Basketball. Tennis. A little track and field. One of the best was Wiffle ball. Thin bat. Plastic ball. With the right amount of spin, you can make the ball dance in front of a batter. Bert Blyleven, eat your heart out. I’m sure Hall of Fame ballplayers played Wiffle ball as children (no empirical evidence here, just a gut check). I can still feel the weight of that plastic in my palm.
Summertime, we’d gather at the park and play until darkness crept. I marveled at the older kids. They hit the ball a country mile, crushing it across the street with ease (that was considered a home run). Trying any drill I could think up, I spent hours trying to catch up. I’d throw a tennis ball against the garage. Swing-weighted bats. Anything to find an edge and beat the other guy. In life, we set a number of goals based on what our peers accomplish. We admire the Porsche or Corvette in the neighbor’s garage. Envy a teammate’s promotion. Become jealous of what our high school classmates went on to accomplish.
I suppose this is fine, an operating system bug found in human nature. Eventually, I did become king of the Wiffle ball diamond. After it happened, the game lost its luster. So it went, until one day our team was soundly beaten by a ragtag group a few towns over. Dejected, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through all that effort again. Thinking back, it makes me ponder if, at times, I was playing the wrong game. Instead of fueling the envy monster, maybe trying to improve would have been the better approach. Self-reflection and measurement are the better answer. But damn, it sure was fun.
Eight Years of Reckoning
When I finished my story’s last page, I wondered if I’d been living on autopilot, optimizing for metrics that don’t matter. What have I missed? The apology I should make? The unused vacation days? Yes, we always say there is more time.
That’s why Elliot’s tale took eight years. Every time I sat down to write Elliot’s reckoning, I had to consider my own. Was I performing for someone instead of being present? What did I gravitate toward at age nine, long before the world started editing me?
Dangerous questions. The kind that make you put the manuscript away for months at a time. The kind that make you avoid that last coat of polish.
We chase the neighbor’s Land Rover, the teammate’s promotion, the home run across the street. But what if the day life breaks isn’t about winning someone else’s game? What if it’s about figuring out which game you actually want to play?
Different Fields
No matter, I did finish that haunting book. And yes, Moriarty wrote a better novel. Let’s be honest; her book is tighter, more commercial, hits the emotional beats with precision. She won this round.
But maybe I was playing the wrong game. That Wiffle ball problem all over again.
One can spend years chasing someone else’s benchmark—write the thriller that sells, craft the plot that hooks, nail the structure that agents want. Meanwhile, the real question wasn’t whether I could hit a home run across the street. It was whether I was even playing on the right field.
The Day Life Breaks forced me to ask: What am I doing with this book? And what does it say about me? And the answer wasn’t to write a bestseller. It was to tell a story. To write something true. Something that made people pause their life’s pursuit and ask themselves the hard questions.
Moriarty’s book sold more copies. Good for her; she earned it.
But we didn’t write the same book. She wrote about fate. I wrote about waking up before it’s too late. Different games. Different rules. Different definitions of winning.
The important thing is to reflect. Not just on the project but on life itself. And maybe, just maybe, stop measuring your swing against the kid across the street. Part of me still thinks I need to go back and clean up that missed period in that darned Crimson Cone chapter. Slow the build-up for certain characters. And, oh, do I have more than a few lazy stereotypes. But that final boardroom scene is epic—I nailed that scene.
Hey, I won’t go back home again. But there’s always another book, and I’ve got three in the pipeline. Ever onward.
Footnotes
The Secret of Secrets, I believe The Guardian summed up the novel well: ”It’s weapons-grade bollocks from beginning to end, none of it makes a lick of sense, and you’ll roar through it with entire enjoyment if you like this sort of thing.” The idea that everyone possesses an internal Statue of Liberty style crown as a receiver is a bit out there. Sigh, what could have been. I admit, I’m jealous of the weapons-grade bollocks line. It’s so good; wish I’d thought of it for my own review.
I want to be clear, craziness is relative to your political positioning. It’s why Democrats and Republicans follow in packs. Recently, I encountered this article describing Ron DeSantis internal polling during his failed 2024 presidential election run. When asked, nearly 75% of Republican voters said Covid Lockdowns were awful, undemocratic. But when one word, rather name, was added to the same question, simply placing Trump before Covid Lockdowns, the percentage flipped on its head. That’s wild. Or expected.
The software that manages this site allows me to run analytics over 200 articles. I don’t go rehash themes often; yet, the keystone article is Presenting The Day Life Breaks. I think we all go back in time now and again.
Liane is an absolute publishing force, selling 20 million copies plus. Read her work; you can’t go wrong.
Be Cool, Pass The JPLA On …
Cardinals Season Predictions, 2026 Edition (What I’m Watching):
Due to travels, I didn’t get this out the door before the season. But it’s obvious this is a franchise in transition, stripped of Mo’s cast offs and now asking a rotation of relative unknowns to carry a young, uneven lineup into a division the Cubs have already claimed as their own. Sigh. The projection systems have the Cardinals winning somewhere between 66 and 75 games.
They are not wrong to be skeptical. But they are wrong.
These systems don’t know what Dustin May looks like when he’s right. They don’t know whether Matthew Liberatore’s improved command is real or a sample-size illusion. And they almost certainly have no idea what to do with Wetherholt, who posted a .973 OPS at Triple-A Memphis last year and has never taken a major league at-bat. Development doesn’t show up cleanly in preseason models. The last three seasons my Cards predictions were within five games of the eventual finish; the data told the story with the caveat I didn’t model a sell off last year. Here, there just isn’t any data.
I’m a homer, but the honest case for optimism runs through pitching. Liberatore looks like a genuine mid-rotation arm. McGreevy has feel. May, signed on a one-year deal, was sitting 97-98 this spring with the hard sinker working—the best he’s looked since his Dodgers days before two Tommy John surgeries interrupted everything. If that holds for 150 innings (a big if), the Cardinals win games they lost last year. A bullpen anchored by Romero and O’Brien isn’t embarrassing. This staff can keep games close.
The real variable is Jordan Walker and Nolan Gorman. They are the lineup’s power ceiling. If both find themselves and produce 25-plus home runs, this offense functions. If one or both disappoint again, there’s nobody behind them to compensate. Wetherholt can get on base. Winn can hit. But who else on this roster is going to drive in 85 runs? That’s the challenge.
Quinn Mathews (the Stanford lefty who lit up the minors in 2024 before a shoulder injury derailed 2025) is the wild card. He’ll start in Memphis, but five or six strong starts gets him a call. If he arrives in July and shows what he showed two years ago, the Cardinals finish the year feeling genuinely encouraged about what’s coming.
With a thumb in the air, I have them at 75–80 wins (again, that sample size problem). Fourth place in the NL Central but not an embarrassment. A year that tells you about the next three.
But hey, who knows? It’s the first time I’ve signed up for Cardinals baseball on MLBTV in three seasons, not knowing the answer is exciting. And I think there’s something here; maybe momentum takes us somewhere.
Chasing Excellence (What I’m Reading, The Cycles Continues):
Not sure where I stumbled upon The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg. But I loved it-this is the self-help book I wish’d I’d drafted after a late night coffee binge. No antenna sharing here. A worthy read.
Productivity Greatness With Text Files (What I’m Tinkering With, Reviewing Productivity):
I used to be an optimize and productivity geek. The problem with Zettelkasten and Inbox Zero methodologies is that these often create more work than intended. Getting to a clean inbox basically means sending more emails. And then, getting them back in return. Sigh. When I was in Roam Research, the Daily Note morphed into an odd religion of categorization. Grant, I did do more than a little writing here.
The challenge with Roam and Notion (I switched here due to lack of updates and an expensive cost model) is that your notes live in proprietary database structures. That’s the tradeoff for what makes them magical. And it’s why I miss Roam as its editable side panels do yeomen’s work.
With Obsidian, everything is built inside markdown files with the software being the linkage brain. But note discoverability is missing, which is why I had avoided the tool. Claude Code addresses this problem because LLMs feed off text and markdown files. Technically, outside of converting your files into machine json, there isn’t a better format. Install Claude Code. Point it at your Obsidian vault. And ask away. Sure, it makes mistakes; yet, with large vaults it’s amazing what one can find in those old notes.
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Meditations
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
