Art is a proven meditation. I always use people I know. I tell them they'll make a marvellous story. It is better to do bad work of one's own. If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.
Every story is completed by the reader.
I'm just a bespectacled novelist who dreamed all this up. The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it. Because it isn't there. I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.