{"id":371,"date":"2026-03-03T20:18:49","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T00:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/?p=371"},"modified":"2026-03-15T20:29:36","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T00:29:36","slug":"sometimes-the-magic-works-lessons-from-a-writing-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/2026\/03\/03\/sometimes-the-magic-works-lessons-from-a-writing-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I finished reading Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life, by Terry Brooks. I had read this book over a decade ago and couldn&#8217;t remember who the author was. I knew it was a science-fiction or fantasy author that I enjoyed, but not enough to search for it successfully. With the advent of AI, I have found that it&#8217;s pretty good at interpreting my described memories to unlock details otherwise lost. It found the book for me with one search and I read it immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I remember finding the book inspirational, and it remains so. Brooks makes writing seem attainable with focus and determination, which is what I most often lack. The book is also filled with thoughts that make me uneasy, like when he describes his life as &#8220;how things used to be&#8221; while failing to recognize it was only his personal experience. He laments how people used to be courteous when he was a kid, but at least has the presence of mind at that point to admit he sounds like his father. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m glad I was able to track this down and give it a second read. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I finished reading Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life, by Terry Brooks. I had read this book over a decade ago and couldn&#8217;t remember who the author was. I knew it was a science-fiction or fantasy author that I enjoyed, but not enough to search for it successfully. With the advent of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":373,"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions\/373"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grantgeiger.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}