MOTIVATION, ESSAYS, AND MUSINGS

What you'll find here has been (and continues to be) written over the years as a sort of personal therapy.

It came at times when I felt ten feet tall and times when I felt so small I might have been invisible.

Nineteen years sober teaches you something very important about yourself, though.

It teaches you that it's okay to be broken, because you can heal.

It teaches you that without the bad, you won't know how to recognize the good.

It teaches you that you can be wrong (a lot), that you can fail repeatedly, and that you can come out on top.

When I need inspiration and answers, I generally go looking for them in books, and more often than not, I find exactly what I am after. My phone is riddled with hundreds of screenshots of lines that inspired me along the way, as well as those little exports you can do of the quote boxes from Kindle highlights. I can't help but collect the things that inspire me in a given moment, like little digital mementos that I keep for a rainy day when I can pull them out and cash in their wisdom when I need it most. So much of what you will find in here are the little pieces of my journey and things that the universe was kind enough to give me to help me get to the next exit.

These works started under my real name (spoiler alert, Eugene Owens is my pen name) because I wanted to keep it separate from my fiction because, like so many things, I was trying to craft perfection before I had gotten started. Elaborate roadmaps have been my M.O. for the last 15 years or so, sketching out the blueprint to things on whiteboards as big as a wall, expecting that if I had it all planned out in advance, I could somehow escape the bumps and bruises along the way. Then, somewhere along the way, I realized that messy was fine and that I didn't need to cultivate an image for anyone to like me. So, I scrapped the whole motivational speaker thing and decided to just do one thing for the first time in my life. I realized that it was important that you knew something about me so that you knew something about my characters.

Using a pen name is interesting, and everyone does it for a different reason.

Some writers find it easier to say the things they need to say behind a different identity.

Some want to separate their personal and professional lives.

Me?

Say the name Stiltner.

Now forget the l in the middle.

Stitner.

Now put the l back in and drop the second t.

Stilner.

The decades-long massacre of my last name made me realize that if I wanted to be a writer that people could tell their friends about, they had to be able to pronounce the name.

Thus, Eugene Owens was born.

As a bonus, my son's name is Owen, so there you go.

I tell you all this and have decided to share all of this writing through this platform because for you to understand Marc McKinley, Van Baker, Reef Hunter, Carter Black, Monty Frost, and whoever the hell else I conjure up, you will get to know a little more about where they came from. I think that's the part of reading fiction that we all love. It's that feeling that we are connected to that hero or heroine on another level. We know something about them, but what we really know or come to learn about is that person behind the keyboard hovering their fingers over the letters at all hours, hoping to channel something from a place they can't actually touch.

These people and places aren't real, but a part of them is real because they are the wanderings of another member of our little eight-billion-person army. They are the accumulated wisdom of that person's journey. They are the wins and the losses. Their world will be imparted to the imaginary people on the page no matter how hard they try not to make it so.

I started this roughly four years ago, and I hope that I will still be doing it forty more from now on.

From the bottom of my heart, thanks for coming along for the ride.