I honestly feel like I've been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after 'Day Of the Dog' came out.

I didn't want to be known. People say, 'I didn't want to toil in obscurity.' I like toiling in obscurity.

I haven't spent years, like Alyse Nelson of Vital Voices, toiling for female economic empowerment on five continents.

When you awaken some morning and hear that somebody or other has been discovered, you can put it down as a fact that he discovered himself years ago - since that time he has been toiling, working, and striving to make himself worthy of general discovery.

It is fitting that yesteryear's swashbuckling newspaper reporter has turned into today's solemn young sobersides nursing a glass of watered white wine after a day of toiling over computer databases in a smoke-free, noise-free newsroom.

Juarez had become a failed city. The mayor of Juarez lived in El Paso. Not only did he not live in his own city, he didn't live in his own country. You had all these kids out of school who didn't want to work because they saw their mothers toiling in jobs for hardly any cash.

One can see the professionals and intellectuals talking to their rural brethren with an amused and condescending smile. They forget that but for the toiling rural masses, all their professional training and erudition would collapse like a castle of cards.

If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people out there toiling over your unpublished manuscript, trying to make your way across that vast ocean in a bathtub, I can only say this to you: keep paddling. Well, either that or start vlogging.

Every so often, I'll get an idea from a dream, but most of the time, ideas come to me while I'm toiling away at the keyboard just like every other writer.