Day 1 as a published author...

I'll defer to Mr. Hank Rearden on this one:

with the unspoken sentence hanging in the air: “Mr. Rearden, it can't be done” – the meals, interrupted and abandoned at the sudden flash of a new thought, a thought to be pursued at once, to be tried, to be tested, to be worked on for months, and to be discarded as another failure – the moments snatched from conferences, from contracts, from the duties of running the best steel mills in the country, snatched almost guiltily, as for a secret love – the one thought held immovably across a span of ten years, under everything he did and everything he saw, the thought held in his mind when he looked at the buildings of a city, at the track of a railroad, at the light in the windows of a distant farmhouse, at the knife in the hands of a beautiful woman cutting a piece of fruit at a banquet, the thought of a metal alloy that would do more than steel had ever done, a metal that would be to steel what steel had been to iron – the acts of self-racking when he discarded a hope or a sample, not permitting himself to know that he was tired, not giving himself time to feel, driving himself through the wringing torture of: “not good enough…still not good enough…” and going on with no motor save the conviction that it could be done – then the day when it was done

I will, however, add one word to the end: better.  Until then...

Vol 17 Issue 3 signing off.