For perspectives sake.

Because I own a bookstore and because I'm insatiably curious about books and read online sites like Shelf Awareness and the New York Times Book Review, I'm aware of how many books there are; most of them pretty good, all of them representing hard work and imagination.

Oh, come on, I hear you saying. Pretty good? Well, yeah. Or they wouldn't have been published. Sure there are clunkers, but there is a quality threshold for paid material that I think is nothing to sneeze at.

So it's easy for me to see every other writer as more creative and harder working than me.

Which may or may not be true.

But the point is -- it doesn't matter. I can't let it discourage me. I need to just keep plowing ahead.

Going to sites like Reddit also show how very clever and humorous other people are: I mean, it's intimidating. It's funny how, depending on how you look at things, people -- all those people out there -- are both stupider and smarter than I usually think they are.

Probably just a reflection of how damn many people there are, that a small percent still represents millions of stupid people and millions of smart people, and everyone in-between.

San Diego Con had 60,000 tickets available yesterday -- for an hour. If you were already registered. Yikes.

A drop in the nerd bucket.

I just have to wrap my brain around the sheer mass of people. Like that the 1% would still represent 3.5 million people. Or say the top 10% of creative people would be 35 million people. The top 20% would 70 million people.

That's some competition, eh?

I'm not saying this is a great insight. But it's an observation that I have to remind myself of on a constant basis.

For perspective.