I'm a scorer, not a triple-double player
I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.
Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.
Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality itself.
This sense of perfection has a built-in contradiction, one that Ram Dass once captured very succinctly by a statement he had heard from his Himalayan guru: "The world is absolutely perfect, including your own dissatisfaction with it, and everything you are trying to do to change it.
He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.
In the kind of world we have today, transformation of humanity might well be our only real hope for survival.
In order to cooperate in the material worlds as agents of a divine power, the spirits temporarily have a material body. By the work required in their corporeal lives, the spirits improve their intelligence and, by observing God's law, they acquire the merits which will lead them to eternal happiness.
Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions. But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century.
As for whether genre considerations influence what I write, they don't at all, but I might sell more books if they did. The Night Journal is a hodge-podge of historical fiction, western, mystery, and contemporary domestic drama. It doesn't settle into a specific market, reviewers have a hard time describing it, and sometimes it gets classified weirdly in bookstores. But from a writer's standpoint, I like that it's hard to categorize.
For an actor, playing one character and transitioning to a completely different one is a dream come true.