In high school, in between my other writing, I occasionally wrote notes about my life. By grade 12 that had become almost all that I wrote, and I've included some excerpts here, to illustrate the state of mind I was in before I read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The positive shift in my thinking after reading that book is very apparent. Its message of pride in humankind was incessant, and was enough to break through my mental fog. It was a lifeline when I very badly needed one.

That basic message then carried into the writing of Humankind is Without Flaw, and over those two years the groundwork was laid for all my future writing.

I didn't realize until recently that the girl who recommended Atlas to me called herself "lightbulb". Cool.