Special Guest Blogger: Leo Tolstoy

Saluton! Nobody becomes a success overnight, even World famous authors of those books noone has ever gotten to the end of have to toil in order to get the life experiences needed to write rocking books so i would keep a notepad i called 'Rules for life' and the first entry was dropped out of University and treated in hospital for venereal disease but i used my down time wisely and listed all the weaknesses such as laziness, mendacity, indecision, sensuality, and vanity and would tick off the ones i had displayed that day.
Laziness put in quite a few appearances because after University i spent much of my time going between Moscow, Tula and Saint Petersburg not really doing very much except running up some gambling debts so when my brother suggest i join the Army, i went along with it and served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War but i was shocked by the amount of death involved in warfare so i left the army and decided to concentrate on my writing where nobody is trying to rain shells down on my head.
I had a few stories published and went to Paris to meet Victor Hugo who showed me his yet to be published 'Les Misérables' and his depiction of the battle scenes in the novel inspired my own in 'War and Peace' and after meeting French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and watching a public execution in Paris, my political needs were met and i became a pacifist, i also nicked the name 'War and Peace' from his Anarchist pamphlet.  
News of my new found pacifism found the ears of a young Indian guy who wrote to me to say i had inspired him and asking for advice on his nation gaining independence from colonial rule, i used that in my 'A Letter to a Hindu' book later so thanks Mahatma Gandhi, hope it all worked out well for you.
My wife and i had 13 children so between writing and wiping smelly botties, i joined some causes such as the Esperanto movement which i thought would help bring about a peaceful co-existence if we all spoke the same language but i was continuing to use real life experiences and my political and religious views as an example for my books, the Anna Karenina story of an adulterous woman trapped by society and War and Peace is pretty much 1,400 pages on the futility of war.
My Anarchists views did not go down well and when i said that the Anarchists are right in everything and no ruling authority could not be more violent than that of the existing Authority all hell broke loose and i was excommunicated from the Church (hello, atheist here, what did they think i would care?) but someone must have agreed because i received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909, note i was nominated, never actually won a damn thing.
My wife and i argued frequently about my views as we aged, especially as i had been ill for a long time and she thought i should be resting so i left home one winter night in an attempt to escape from another of my wife's tirades and caught a train to Astapovo, sat at the station and quietly died.
What i did learn is that whatever particular era of human society we are in, it will probably have the shelf life of bagged lettuce. There is no good old days, it is always a bunch of jerks just winging it until something better comes along except absolutely everyone in every era before thought the same thing. It turns out that every attempt to 'improve thing' just makes it worse so Adiau kaj dankon and if you understand that then the Esperanto thing must have really taken off.