Just so you don't have the wrong impression, it's not all fawns on the lawn here at Longleaf. We work at our desks five days a week from 7 AM CST until 3:30 PM CST. Like most folks, the "brain time" spent thinking about the work spills over into nights and weekends, too.
After selling businesses and retiring from corporate life more than ten years ago, Buck and I learned to supplement income and hang on to savings by investing in the stock market. Yes (gasp). The Market. It's what we do, during good times, bad times, near Armageddon times, and back-from-the-brink times.
Some days it's fun. Some days it's hell. We joke about donning hard hats, combat boots and flak jackets before sitting down to work. Our computers are at opposite ends of a folding office supply house table. A table-top television sits between us, where it stays on CNBC business news all day and Bloomberg all night. I have developed a bad (bad, bad, very bad) habit of peeking at international and pre-market futures from my cell phone in the middle of the night.
Most writers have demanding non-writing jobs, or young children, or debilitating illness, or inhospitable partners, or an insidious voice inside their own heads that dishonors their efforts, or grinding poverty that denies them the most basic tools, or some other barrier.
There's an old expression: "It takes a lot of dirt to grow pretty roses." We are not children. We are not hot house flowers, writing lyric essays in a vacuum. We are in the world. We are of the world. And we are all really something.
