Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 128

Steven Press­field is a writer of two worlds

In one world, he's the cel­e­brated author of The War of Art—a book that has quickly become the field man­ual for any­one engaged in cre­ative or artis­tic work of any kind, espe­cially entre­pre­neurs and writ­ers. In the other world he's the king of all mil­i­tary epics and his­tor­i­cal sagas — a think­ing man's Tom Clancy
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"We Are Going to War"

The following is from "Israel Journal: June, 1967," a brilliant first-person account of the Sinai battles of the Six Day War by Yael Dayan, the daughter to Moshe Dayan and an accomplished journalist and novelist in her own right (as well as, later in her career, a member of the Israeli Knesset and Deputy Mayor
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Do Book Videos Work?

I can't think about William Blake's "The Lamb" without thinking about Shelby's and Jonathan's impressions of Foghorn Leghorn reading the poem:
"Ah… Little Lamb. Ah, say… Ah, Little Lamb. Dost thou know… I, say, I say, dost thou know who made thee?
We were seniors in Ms. Wilmers' high school English class and she had just finished
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A Kindle and Nook Un-Contest

Two weeks from today, The Profession goes on sale. We were thinking about having a contest with prizes to celebrate, but we decided that was much too complicated. So instead we're giving away stuff without a contest.
The two grand prizes—attorneys, take note: they're not really "prizes"—are a Nook (WiFi) and a Kindle (WiFi), both to be loaded with the
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A Letter from Lawrence of Arabia

The piece below comes not from Seven Pillars of Wisdom or from the David Lean movie or from Michael Korda's wonderful new book, Hero. It's from a letter written by T.E. Lawrence during the WWI revolt in the Arabian desert, when he led what the British called "Bedouin irregulars" against the Turks.

Alas, I can't recall
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The Pain of Being Human

The Gnostics believed that exile was the psychological condition of the human being. It certainly feels that way to me.
We've been talking about artists and addicts for the past couple of weeks. Not every artist is an addict, and certainly not every addict is an artist. But it seems to me that both share an
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"The Sea! The Sea!"

Xenophon was an Athenian nobleman, warrior and writer from the fourth century B.C. Here's a story:
When Xenophon was a young man, he chanced to enter a narrow lane from one end at the same time that Socrates was entering from the other. It was just the two of them walking toward each other. Though Athens
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The Art of An Auction

Our agent has called her client and informed her that she has a substantial pre-empt offer for her narrative nonfiction proposal. Should they take the deal on the table or roll the dice and wait for the results of the auction the agent has scheduled the next day?
There are seven houses that have intimated that
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The Artist and the Addict

The artist and the addict are not very far apart, are they? Often they're one and the same. A blues musician or a painter can be an addict one minute and an artist the next. He can be an artist and an addict at the same time. On Tuesday you're rocking the casbah; on Wednesday
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This Week and Next

Thus endeth our series, The Warrior Ethos. To read the full book for free, click here. A "lightbox" will open. For those (like me) who are not 100% hip to lightboxes, they're like e-books except you don't need a Kindle or an iPad; you can read them on your regular laptop or desktop.














































Once you're in
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