Patrick E. McLean's Blog

I have been blown away by the response to my essay on Hope.

I wrote it out of frustration. I know many people who are struggling, yet seem to have frozen in place with either the enormity and difficulty of the situations they face. Social media can exacerbate this, for sure. So can being shut in a house for a long time.

I have been locked in place by hopelessness, but I have also learned (through some pain and suffering) that action has a kind of magic in it. And e...

In the United States, the richest country in the world, every measure of mental health is plummeting. And has been before the pandemic. In a recent survey CDC entitled, "Mental Health, Substance Use, and Suicidal Ideation During the COVID-19 Pandemic" a full 10 percent of the U.S. population had seriously considered suicide in the month of June. For 18-24 year olds that number was 25. And 69.9% of 18-24 reported suffering from depressive or anxiety disorders.

So, I'm going to talk about hope. An...

This is my pep talk. This is my half-time speech. I know the truth of this deep in my bones and so do you.

Everything happens 5 minutes at a time.

In fact, most important things happen in even smaller intervals. Disagree? Go out and time a few marriage proposals, car accidents or heart attacks.

The idea that you have to devote your whole life to do something great (or 10,000 hours) is a lie. If you look closely at big changes you can see that they are good PR (or whopping lies)...

INTRO SCRIPT: It's Thursday and this is a throwback to a Seanachai podcast episode first shipped Sept, 8th, 2005. I have precious little explanation for this bit of madness other than to say I was a writer who had set an absurd deadline for himself and who was trying to uphold the highest production standard I knew how.

The genesis of this a conversation I had in an odd moment between panels at DragonCon. As you'll hear from the result it was a very odd moment indeed. Something about the rock pa...