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Posts published in “About Writing”

Some creative thinking for the dawn of 2024

Happy New Year, everyone! I was fumbling around the internet recently and came across a post on Fstoppers that provides a framework about how to process your creative output from last year and your creative goals for this year. I thought it would be fun and interesting to go through this list here to share with you all.

Note that I am going to change some of the photography-specific language in the questions to be broad. I’m a photographer, sure, but I’m also a bunch of other things all lumped together.

Ok? Ok! Cool! Let’s get going.

  1. On a scale of 1 to 10 how do you feel about your year as a creator?

    Pretty iffy, overall. I posted 18 times here for the entirety of 2023: 8 were photos of my kids, 4 were TBLR posts, leaving just 6 that were actual writing. Not so great? But I did restart my TBLR project and am pretty happy with how that’s going. There’s been a bit of a lull through the holidays and all that business, but I have one in process that will go up soon. So that’s fun. I also have six more Failure States planned for when I feel like wallowing a bit.

  2. What is one big lesson you learned as an artist this year?

    I wish I could say I learned something, but I am not sure what that would be? I haven’t pushed myself too hard this year. Granted we had a baby which took up a whole lot of time between January and the summer, but that’s not a good excuse. The honest truth is that I just didn’t make much time to be creative this year. Anxiety, depression, shit even just distraction. I’ve been not so good for myself this year as with many other years.

  3. Glance through your calendar for this year, are you happy with how you invested your time? Why or why not?

    Not really. I spent a lot of time in 2023 dicking around and not getting too much done. Not that my value is determined by my output, but there was quite a lot of time that I spent messing around that I could have used better. I log all the time I do professional creative work in a notebook that sits on my desk. For a good part of the year I also logged the time I did personal creative work, but that sort of dropped off. I suppose that I subconsciously felt ashamed or something about how little time I was logging for it. Kind of silly. I should probably start logging it again this year.

  4. What piece or series was the best one you produced this year, and why was it the best?

    I guess we can call this the resurrected The Black Laser Reads. I’ve been thinking about this for years but never felt like I had the technical skill to execute in a way I would have felt good about. But over the last two years or so I’ve been recording a lot of voice over auditions and learning a lot about processing audio for that purpose. Suddenly, this year, I realized I actually do have the skill to execute TBLR v2 in a manner up to my standards. That is pretty satisfying. I have so many books in line. I could fill my entire year just reading for TBLR and do nothing else. A bit of a trap there, actually.

  5. Evaluate your [output]. Are your pieces where you want them to be artistically? Technically?

    Nah, they never are. My work can always be better. I think, for me, that artistic and technical quality go hand-in-hand. If one isn’t in place, then the whole work is a bit of a failure. I always try to accomplish both and consider both in the evaluation of the work after releasing it to the world. And I am not writing nearly enough. Not nearly enough.

  6. What do you like about your [work]? What do you dislike about [it]?

    I like the creation of it. I like the feeling of focusing on a project and doing my best to make sure it comes out well. But I wish it were more varied. I love my kids, but I’d like to take photos of something that’s not just them. I love reading audiobooks, but I also need to be writing for myself. And I have some video work planned that I can’t get off the ground for schedule, childcare, and financial reasons. A lot of things I’d like to have done, but did not do for a lot of reasons that just feel like silly excuses no matter how real they are.

  7. Are you producing great work, mediocre work, expected work, innovative work, or poor work and why?

    Somewhere between good and average. Above average, perhaps?

  8. What did you accomplish this year that you are most proud of?

    I kept my kids alive and they are nice people. That’s it.

  9. What are you most disappointed about from this past year as a creator?

    It’s been a bit of a creative wash. A lot of attempts, a lot of struggle, a lot of effort and thought and learning and support work, but not a lot of results. Frustrating.

  10. What is one thing you want to stop doing (1), start doing (2), and continue doing (3) in 2024?

    First, I’d like to stop sabotaging myself and cutting myself so much slack. Do I need to drink a couple glasses of wine or beers at the end of the night? No, not at all. Do those things affect me? Sure! They definitely allow me to convince myself with excuses and they affect my sleep which makes the early mornings pretty useless. This isn’t even really about alcohol dependence or some feeling that I am an addict. I don’t feel that way. But I do think I could be better about saving that sort of thing for times where it makes sense and not rely on it as a way to blow off steam at the end of the night. Even if I knock out 30 minutes of work that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, that is a positive outcome. This was one of my major takeaways from our most recent Whole30.

    Second, I’d like to start writing fiction again. When we were living in my mother in law’s basement before Sarah gave birth to the triplets, I started a story that I quite liked. I worked on it until Penny and Bea came home from the NICU, but really lost the emotional steam for it when Olive’s health took a downward turn. In fact, that story has opened automatically every time I’ve opened Scrivener since then. That’s like 3 years now. That’s a lot of auto-openings. I need to get back to it. There’s no craft that I enjoy as much as writing stories, but there’s also no craft I feel quite so unsure, so unconfident, so weird about. That feeds into a lot of fear and guilt and other stupid, self-defeating nonsense. I just need to rip off that bandaid and build some momentum.

    I think the best way to do this is to set a real schedule for myself. For the last few weeks I have been deliberately waking up earlier. Trying to retrain my sleep schedule. Once in my younger adulthood, the middle of the night was a fertile creative time. Now, however, in my early forties with three children that just isn’t true anymore. It took me a while to realize this. No, that’s not quite right. It took me a while to admit this to myself. Hence the deliberate schedule shift. My goal is to get to the point where I can wake up early, spend an hour writing, and then engage with my day as a stay at home dad. Because that’s my life. I need to make it work. I want to make it work. The time for it is now.

    I’d also like to take photos of stuff again. I feel like I’ve fallen into glorified snapshot mode, which is fine, but is not creatively rewarding. I am still going to take too many photos of my kids, of course, but I would like to also take photos of stuff that’s not my kids. You get it.

    Third, I’d like to continue with TBLR and Failure State. Those are fun projects that I can work on when I am not fresh. That is, late at night, after a long day of small children screaming for my attention. I can absolutely zone out and edit mouth noises out of my performance of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” while exhausted. No problem at all. What I can’t do in that state is form compelling thoughts and ideas and then translate them into words. Best to use that time of the day for projects that don’t require 100% of my processing power.

So that’s about it. Some optimization for this coming year. Some places I’d like to put more juice. You know what would also be great? Getting a job. Or jobs. I’ve been seriously underemployed since Verdant collapsed and that is driving me nuts. But I’ll save that for Failure State: Verdant Construction whenever I get around to writing that.

A Great Discworld ReRead & Read

I love Discworld. A lot.

I was first introduced to Terry Pratchett through Good Omens in the late 90s. I’d been a big fan of Hitchhiker’s Guide so the humor spoke to teenage me. Good Omens is great. One of very few books I’ve read more than once. But I didn’t really know anything about the Discworld series. Not that there was a good way to learn about things like that besides word of mouth, stumbling on them in a bookstore or library, or maybe some cruddy Geocities website.

I learned about the books from a TA at a summer film program I attended at the Maine Photographic Workshops and it sort of blew my mind. An entire series like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, but longer and about fantasy? Written by one of the guys who wrote Good Omens? Fantastic! Getting the books was a little tougher, though.

This was an era before easily accessible electronic copies of books and most of the older Discworld books were out of print in the US or hard to find. And I certainly wasn’t going to start somewhere in the middle of the series like some insane person with no respect for order. But then Harper Collins started reprinting mass market paperback versions in chronological order.

That meant the time was right. So I dug in! For years, from the reprinting of Color of Magic in 2000 , I’d pick up the next Discworld book as it was reprinted or printed in the US, careful to read them only in original publication order.

If you ask people, they’ll often recommend you start with some of the later books and then only return to the early ones if you find you’ve become a fan. Nonsense. I think the beginning is the best place to start. You really get to see Pratchett come into his own not only as a writer but also as the creator of a world that starts as a sort of send-up of sword and sorcery tropes but becomes a rich, living, satirical thing of its own that is unlike just about anything else in modern fiction.

Discworld is silly. Discworld is exciting. Discworld is profound.

Discworld is great. I love Discworld.

I’ve wanted to start at the beginning again, reread the ones I’ve read already, and finally read the ones I haven’t. About a year ago I had the idea to start collecting Kindle versions as they went on discount and would work my way through as they became available. By the beginning of 2024, I’d collected three books: The Color of Magic (Discworld 1), Hogfather (Discworld 20), and Raising Steam (Discworld 40). Ok. A start. It’s probably going to take me a long time.

And then yesterday I found that Humble Bundle is selling 39 of the 41 Discworld books for the price of a burger and a beer. It might be the universe’s biggest no-brainer. How could I possibly say no to this?

Sure, the books activate on the Kobo store (what?). Sure, it’s missing the graphic novel The Last Hero and Raising Steam (the latter of which I already have). Sure, Humble Bundle is kind of sketchy now. But almost all the books? In one place? For eighteen stupid dollars?

Done.

I spent about 2 hours converting the files with Calibre and then sending them off to my Kindle for the sheer convenience of having them all in one place with all my other ebooks. Time consuming, sure, but easy and didn’t require a ton of thought. A little metadata clean up here, find new cover artwork there, and boom! All done.

Now I can reread and read the whole series. So follow along with me as I work my way through forty Discworld books over the next few years. I’ll give each a write up here as a way to stay honest about my progress. Honestly, I am pretty excited about it. If you love Discworld, or are at all curious about it, I encourage you to read along with what is sure to be a wild ride. Should be fun!

Book “Review”: The Book of Accidents

The Book of Accidents was my first Chuck Wendig novel. I’m not even really sure how I happened upon it. Perhaps some reddit thread or one of the various book websites that pop into my view while wasting time on the internet. Regardless, I found it. I purchased it. I read it.

And I liked it! And my wife liked it. I generally know while reading something if Sarah is going to click with it. Some stuff—particularly the deep genre science fiction and fantasy books—just isn’t for her. We have different tastes on some things. That’s ok! But when I encounter a novel that has strong horror vibes, a good hook, and a fun mystery to work through without wallowing in bleakness, I can be pretty sure she’s going to enjoy it.

The Book of Accidents is one of those books. What starts off as a story of a man reconciling the death of his estranged father evolves into an inter-dimensional, cosmic mystery. And, boy, what a ride. I don’t usually care about spoilers. It seems to me that the fun of something is the journey, not the destination. But this book has a whole lot of fun twists that I didn’t anticipate and won’t ruin for you. Sarah wanted to talk about the plot while she was reading it, but I refused so as not to ruin the revelations that lay in wait. It took some significant willpower on my part.

The novel absolutely rips along with a tempo that never gives you a moment to stop coupled with short chapters that often kept me up way too late to finish just one more. Wendig here rivals Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 or any Brandon Sanderson novel in keeping me awake reading. It’s rare that a novel can keep me up for longer than 5 or 10 pages at night, leading to me often dragging out novels for much longer than strictly necessary. But I flew through this book in only a few weeks. Fast for me.

If I had one complaint about the book, it’s that Wendig likes to reference real world media, much like Stephen King, to whom this book’s style owes quite a bit. The characters can’t help but mention this month’s popular meme or Dungeons and Dragons or whatever. It’s a quibble, and it is probably just a personal thing, but I’ve never liked this sort of reference. It takes me out of the story’s world just a little, breaks the spell just enough. I like my fourth wall, damn it. If you’re going to break it, do it for something worth more than making a comment about your favorite table top roleplaying game.

Would I recommend this one? Definitely. If you’re looking for a fun, fast-paced horror novel, get it. If you’re not looking for those things, but still enjoy a well-written mystery story with some supernatural elements, get it. If all this sounds like the most uninteresting thing in the world to you, I don’t know, go listen to a TED Talk or something.

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The Avocado Book

The girls have this book, Little Avocado’s Big Adventure, and it’s got this cute little avocado finger puppet in the middle. Look:

He’s cute! You can wiggle him around while reading it and they absolutely love it. Easy to please, sure, but the little extra jazz is fun. If you look closely enough, you can see that they also think the book is quite delicious.

From the cover we learn that Little Avocado is going on vacation somewhere to sit by the pool. That certainly seems like a Big Adventure, especially if you are 11 months old. While I’m not totally clear on how an avocado wears the flip-flops on the floor next to his lounge chair, I’m willing to go along with the story.

This is nice! Our little avocado buddy is hanging out with other food friends. We’ve got our short and green avocado, a tomato, a lime, an onion, a Mexican bag of tortilla chips, and another slice of lime. Who seems to be in some sort of distress? Perhaps because he’s so tart? Or because he has been cut? It’s not really clear why Mr. Lime Wedge is unhappy. We can only speculate.

He’s getting ready for his trip! I hope he’s packed all the essentials. The onion is crying (or laughing) because that’s what onions do to people. Unless you’re wearing contact lenses, but that’s a discussion for another post. Everything else seems to be in order. The tomato is jumping. The whole lime is having a great time. The bag of chips’ mustache looks great. And the lime wedge is…. screaming?

Oh.

Oh my god.

The avocado is afraid of being murdered to make guacamole.

The little green avocado is escaping the kitchen where he is due to be cut open, scooped out, and mashed with his friends into the “world’s best guacamole”. And the only one of his friends who has any idea is the already mutilated lime wedge. The bag of chips has been disemboweled and his insides are dancing around the bowl. The tomato and onion have no idea what fate has in store for them. The avocado is abandoning his friends so he does not have to meet the reaper.

This isn’t a story about going on an adventure; this is a story about someone running for their life.

He left the lime wedge! So consumed with fear for his own life, the avocado left his friend who directly requested aid behind to suffer the very ignominious fate the avocado is running from. Perhaps the avocado is a self-centered monster who doesn’t care about anyone but himself.

Nevertheless, he’s on the plane now with some other fruit friends, none of whom are Mexican stereotypes, literally flying for his life.

A good question, to be sure. Based on this map, the avocado is either coming from somewhere in Yukon, Canada or from Russia’s coast along the Kara Sea and is destined for Western Australia, with a layover in New York City.

Though the book claims we’ll never know, I feel like we established where avocado’s flight from the clutches of the grave took him. Palm trees, sunshine, pools. Little guy is in Perth or somewhere in the vicinity.

But, wait a second. Wait a second. What is that on the table next to avocado? Is he drinking from the hollowed out skull of a coconut?? Forget that strawberry, banana, and pineapple seem to be totally cool with this refreshment abomination, witness protection program avocado is a monster! First he abandons lime wedge, and now he is enjoying a beverage from the split open head of another fruit friend? What bleak hell is this book? Murder! Abandonment! Cannibalism! Mutilation! Racism!

And thus ends the nightmare that is Little Avocado’s Big Adventure. Thankfully we only have to bear 12 pages of this ghastly tale. The mind of Brick Puffinton is a truly horrifying place.

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A Brief List of Goals for 2022

While I’ve gone over my primary goal of staying away from social media for the year previously, I’ve also been thinking about some things I’d like to accomplish for the year. It’s not a bad idea to add a positive thread to a year about avoiding things, even if the things I’m avoiding are crazy-making.

These aren’t just personal or professional goals, but a mix of the two. In this era of working from home in the midst of being a stay-at-home parent, the lines between the two types of goals are often hazy, so why not mix them together in this list and let it fly? They’re already mixed together in my head. Besides, work is essentially personal since, for me at least, I work to support my life rather than live to work.

I share these with you as a commitment device. If you, faceless reader, know that I am striving to accomplish these things, then I will more easily be able to pressure myself out of slacking.

In no particular order, here we go.

  • Record some TBLR episodes: I dabbled with The Black Laser Reads many years ago and then sort of let it drop. However, I’ve been thinking about The Black Laser Reads non-stop since then. A dig through the post archive reveals that only two episodes were released, both in the in summer of 2011. That means it’s been bouncing around in my head for ten and a half years with little public action. I’ve finally got an acceptably imperfect VO booth set up here in my office and an ever-deepening list of public domain works that I am interested in. It’s just a matter now of doing the recording.
  • Make more photos: Sarah and I have this crazy idea of owning a photo studio one day, but, as a photographer, I feel like I still need lots of practice. I’m getting the dust out and I shoot and process very deliberately, but there are so many aspects I need to improve on before I’d be comfortable charging for the work. Practice practice!
  • Improve my photo compositing skills: I am like a B-minus level photo compositor. The problem is that I don’t really know what I need to do to improve. I enjoy the work, definitely, but I am at a bit of an impasse where I need some structured education in the matter. I really just want our holiday cards to be better than everyone else’s. Simple.
  • Write more on The Black Laser: I’ve already started doing this. I’d like to keep it up. At the beginning, I wrote here all the time about anything that interested me. A lot of it is very bad, but that is the price we pay to get better at a skill. Then, for many years—let’s call them “The Quiet Years”—I worried that no one cared at all about what I wrote here. That is the result of my skill and taste levels increasing at different rates. Significantly better taste with moderately better skill. Many ideas were hatched and all were killed by the “Why bother?”s. Much silence ensued. Now, while I am still unconvinced that people are too interested in what I have to write, the whole purpose is the bother. That is, the work is the reason to do the work. And I’m enjoying it again!
  • Write some more stories: During the class at Cabrillo I was on a streak. Sure, it was for the class, but I was in the mindset and the barrier to the work was low. Then we had COVID hit the world, the cross-country move, the triplets pregnancy, the temporary move to Maryland, the birth of the girls, the unending hospital misery, the loss of Olive, the move back to Delaware, and the struggle to figure out how to be parents who work. Somewhere along the way, the needle just sort of popped out of the groove. I’d like to flip it over and start the B side.
  • Make a local friend: It’s crazy what social distancing and two little girls who can’t walk yet will do to prevent you from making friends. No one’s fault, of course. As much of an introvert as I am, having a friend within driving distance would probably not be such a bad idea. How to make that friend is a totally different proposition.
  • Continue to practice my penmanship: My handwriting is not bad, by any means, but it is a funny mix of half-remembered cursive and printing. You will often see both a cursive S and a printing S in the same word. I purchased the Spencerian Penmanship book set a few months ago and was steadily practicing while doing overnights just after we brought Penelope and Beatrice home. After the move back to Delaware, I have not been keeping up with it so well. There’s something about not having 8 hours of forced quiet time every single night to make you lose sight of the learning you were doing. Of course, my penmanship doesn’t matter at all, but it’s something I’d like to improve so I am going to.

That’s kind of a lot of stuff, I guess. But there is kind of a lot of time in a year and it is important to have goals. Keep up with me and see how far I get! Commitment devices!

Also, you might have noticed an audio file embedded in the top of this post. Click it! That’s me reading to you on my website for your enjoyment. I thought that adding audio versions of these posts would be a fun way to add a little value to the site and give me a chance to hone my monologue editing skills. You get all the benefit; I do all the work. Win-win.


Photo by Erfan Afshari on Unsplash

Book “Review”: Station Eleven

Goodreads tells me it took me nearly five months to read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. That is between October 5, 2020 and February 10, 2021. Quite a long time to read a mere 333 pages of prose. While I am not the world’s speediest reader, five months for a novel this length is pretty long even for me.

I jumped into the book knowing nothing about it on the recommendation of a friend. And, boy howdy, was it a humdinger. Eight months into heavy COVID, and I am greeted to a post-apocalyptic novel about a world ended by a super flu. I found the whole setup a little TooCloseToHome dot com for me and had to put it down after a little while, hence the protracted reading period. And if you’re worried about spoilers, this all happens within the first chapter of the book.

It’s not that the novel is bad. Not at all. It’s fantastic. Compelling characters. Beautiful prose. A lushly painted world. But it was causing me all sorts of anxiety reading it, and in October of 2020 I just was not in the headspace to finish it. So, I spent some time with some horror novels and short stories and came back to the book when I felt a little more balanced. Which, doing the math, must have been around when the girls were born. Makes sense. While the pandemic hadn’t lifted, a vaccine was in sight and Trump had lost. Two major stressors out of the way allowed me to dig back in without losing my dang mind.

Would I recommend this one? You bet. If you’re happy to experience a beautifully-written, time-hopping story in which the plot is a distant second to the inner lives of the characters, then this one is for you. St. John Mandel has a gothic sensibility with the way she treats the ephemerality of life after the end of the world as it contrasts to the always-on, always-available life before. It is almost poetic, a meditation on how easily things come and go and how fragile our lives actually are.

Plus, there’s an adaptation coming out on HBO any day now. You might as well spend less than five months with the novel before binging the show.

Anne Rice has died.

The announcement of Anne Rice’s death is making the news today. As with many weird kids, her Vampire Chronicles books were formative for me during my teen years. My friend Derek Lomas let me read his well-worn copy of The Vampire Lestat one summer at camp in the mid-1990s and it kind of blew my mind? I’d never read anything quite like it before—lurid, violent, sexy, rich—and I’m not sure I’ve read anything quite like it since. I went on to read everything through The Vampire Armand before sort of losing track of the series as one does as an 18 year old.

More recently, I listened to the audio book of The Witching Hour, the first book in her Lives of the Mayfair Witches series. It accompanied me while driving to doctor appointments 2 hours away during Sarah’s pregnancy, then to see the girls in the NICU, and finally to see Olive in the PCICU. It is a massive book and the recording clocks in at more than 50 hours, providing me with a lot to listen to during one of the harder moments in my adult life. Kate Reading’s narration (and amazing Dutch accent) of Anne Rice’s words is an inextricable part of the memory collage of the whole experience. A nice part, as it goes.

So, thank you, Anne Rice, for the escape. First for the escape from aches and pains of being a teenager, and second for the escape from the nightmare around a terminally ill child. Rest easy.

Creative Writing Final Reflection

After a quarter and a half of business school and the work that went into the application and GMAT, I was starting to feel a little bit like I was losing myself. I hadn’t made anything for myself in ages which was making me seriously anxious. But between graduate school and work demands, I knew I would never make time to correct the imbalance.

My solution? Enroll in another class on Tuesday nights between my Monday/Wednesday blocks of MBA classes. Reasonable!

Ultimately it proved to be a great decision. Tuesday night creative writing class at Cabrillo quickly became the highlight of my week. For me, immersing myself—even in such a small dose—in something creative was critical for my mental health. It really helped rekindle my love for fiction writing.

No, that’s not right. My love was kindled, but I had a big block in my head. What the class did was provide enough structure to get through that block. The class gave me the reason to push through the block and actually get words down on paper and then provided me with a method to actively discuss the work with other real-live humans in meatspace, instead of just putting it up here to languish. That was pretty special for me and felt rewarding in a way I didn’t anticipate when I signed up for the class.

The class also provided a venue for me to interact with other creative people in a way now missing from my life. I love the people I work with and the people I go to business school with, but I missed having weirdos (like me) to talk to about artsy nerd stuff.

I could write a whole post about it (and I probably will), but for now I will share with you the final reflection I wrote for the class. It provides some insight into where my head is these days and maybe you’ll get something out of it. I got something out of writing it.


1. In which of the following elements of fiction do you feel you grew the most? In which do you still wish to grow more? -Character, Setting, Dialog, Plot, Imagery, Point of view, Other…

I focused most on the structure of my work, and thinking of each as a coherent structural unit. I was digging through my blog recently (so 00’s) and found tons of fiction I have little memory of writing. Some of it was good, but some of it was not so good. All of it was fully improvised in the moment. Pantsed. That’s where my practice lies. And for that reason, thinking about writing a longer piece always seemed pretty overwhelming, insurmountable.

When I enrolled in this class, I knew I had a block in my head about longer works, that I lacked the tools to engage a longer piece. Getting some practice considering the writing as a standalone unit rather than a scene proceeding from and leading to another scene was important and something I was deliberate about. I knew that thinking about each story this way would translate to thinking about longer pieces the same way. All I needed was to get into the habit.

Truthfully, I didn’t nail it on all my stories. The first one was a single unit. One and done. The second one was unfinished when submitted. I’ve since finished it and sent it out to the journals. The third was really just a sketch of a bigger idea. If I had to grade myself on nailing the idea of keeping each one of these as an independent unit, then I didn’t do so well. But if the idea was to figure out how to make these freestanding units within a larger project, then I think I did all right.

Past that, the aspect I struggle with the most is plot. I’ve always thought of plot as doing, not happening. It needs to feel like the choices characters make are the choices they would make if it was a real situation, if they were real people with real drives. I get stuck in a pattern of thinking, “well, I guess they could just sort of do anything, right?” and that leads nowhere. Creating a plot that feels motivated and purposeful is a little bit like playing the role of your characters as if you were an actor. But, in this case, it’s like you are one actor playing every single role all at once and that is pretty hard to focus on. One or two sets of motivations and desires and obstacles, sure, but dozens? Tough. That will require much practice. It’s a one-man show with an ensemble cast that is forty hours long.

2. What is your long term goal as a writer? (Both as what you want to achieve artistically, and how you hope the world will receive it.)

I’d like to see if I can make a living writing. I’ve always wanted to make a living in a creative field, and, for a long time, I did. The older I get and the more experienced I get, the more I recognize that I am not so good at working with other people. Over the years I’ve learned to do it, but I am impatient and often prickly when I feel like I don’t have the autonomy to execute as I think is best. It’s a bad tendency that I try to temper, but still comes up now and then.

What I am really good at is executing to a deadline when I need to. Want me to go sit an office all day? NOPE. Grumpy Joe all the time. But, give me a list of things to finish and a deadline and the autonomy to do them in the order and method I choose? You’re going to get everything as requested to the best of my ability. Writing professionally is, from what I know, a lot like that. I just need to get myself to a place where someone wants to give me some deadlines. I can, of course, give them to myself, but that is less effective.

I understand that it’s not some magical free-for-all, do-what-thou-wilt arrangement, that there is pressure from publishers and editors and agents and booksellers and the realities of the market. The auteur is always tempered by the situation. I’ve learned that lesson a thousand times already. I am prepared for it and not at all worried about it. I long ago rid myself of the delusion that my art is ineffable, too great to be sullied by the crassness of commerce. Anyone who wants to make a living has to learn that.

Beyond the lifestyle aspect, I really enjoy writing and telling stories. It’s what drew me to the film world in the first place. Humans are storytellers. It is an important part of how we interact with each other and an important part of what we leave for those who follow us. And I really think I have stories to tell that will resonate with people. What else could someone ask for? If I can reach out through my words and make someone’s day or week or month better, then I am happy.

3. What has been your journey with your inner critic? What is the critic saying to you these days? How do you handle it?

He’s a real son of a bitch. My greatest enemy, even with things I know I am good at. It’s been a lifetime struggle that is sometimes ok, sometimes terrible. I am getting better at working through the terrible and giving myself permission not to generate perfection at all times. That was a difficult lesson to learn.

He’s better these days, less quick to reject any thought I have. I’ve found the best way to deal with him is to just talk to someone about my ideas. That’s something I’ve never had before. Voicing them gives them life and allows a different part of my brain to process them, which I think is helpful. I’ve discovered that talking about the ideas with other people is a helpful way to create what my wife calls “commitment devices”; if someone knows I should be working on something it keeps me accountable. And accountability always wins out over the voice. It’s a factor that always worked for me with my film editing (since you never just edit for only yourself), but not something I incorporated into my writing life until this class. Pretty wild to think about, but I’ve always been too shy about the work to talk about it. I’d post it all over the internet with my name on it and to the social medias and whatever, but speaking about it aloud was hard. Weird how these things are sometimes, right? Part of what I looked for with this course was enough confidence to talk about these things aloud and that has been a great success. I am very thankful for it.

4. Do you plan to keep writing after the class? What will this look like? (How often, where, etc.) Do you want to form a workshop with buddies from the class?

Yes. I am planning a novel version of The Boneman (title subject to change) in the weeks until my business school quarter ends. I dropped all my summer MBA classes when I learned that school would only be online. It doesn’t work for me at all. Too old, I guess, but I really require the in-person engagement for classroom learning.

I am giving myself a little break from writing until the end of the quarter, but will be using my free time to do some pre-writing and outlining of the novel. I’d like to be ready to execute as soon as finals are done. From there I have a weekly word count to hit—which may or may not be totally reasonable—and a deadline for the first draft of the project. It’s all subject to change as things evolve, but this will be a good way to start.

I would love to form a workshop with buddies. Ann, JJ, Lily, and I spoke about it during our final workshop session. I’ve already sent them work to read since then. And even if it’s not as formal as the You Are A Mirror set-up, having someone to chat with about the work is super helpful. Obviously. That’s why people have writing groups, right? I’d love to have something more formal, but it’s pretty hard with the plague quarantine. I’m sure that the group will evolve as time goes on too. All groups do.

5. How did the move to online learning impact your experience of the class?

Real talk. It was terrible. I thought you did a great job of the sudden shift from real-life to online, especially considering how quickly you had to make the change. But the online format, as I mentioned earlier, does not work for me. And for a class like this one that relies so much on discussion and open communication, the format just doesn’t work. It also didn’t help that like 60% of the class just disappeared when we went online. And it’s really tough to have a conversation with other students who elect not to use their camera. Talking to a name whose face you cannot see is pretty unhelpful. You did your best and I recognize it and appreciate it.

6. Do you plan to take another creative writing class?

Maybe. I believe my only option at Cabrillo is to retake this class as 12A. Santa Clara isn’t an option. And Hunter didn’t take me for their MFA program either time. If something comes up, I’d like to take another class. I really enjoyed this one. Tuesday night was a bright spot in my week. Just not totally sure what my options are.

I intend to keep learning, though. I have a number of writing books queued up to keep my brain churning along on the best way to tell stories. I’m going to finish the Anne Lamott book. That one is best a chapter at a time. I’m going to give King’s On Writing a run. I purchased and read the beginning of Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction which you mentioned in class. That one is a touch dense and will have to wait until my non-fiction reading doesn’t also include Data Analytics and Ethics for Managers. But I am excited to read the genesis of the unreliable narrator. Dipping in and out of books like these is a great way to give my brain something to process while I do other stuff.

7. What activities did you most enjoy?

-specific group interactive writing games (We didn’t do a lot of these because of the move to online learning. Address them if you remember them, and if not, don’t worry about it.)

-specific individual writing prompts

Hands-down the thing I most enjoyed was the workshop. The prompts were good and helpful for getting into the mood. I even generated a handful of ideas there I’m going to develop. The music playlist game was fun too and I enjoyed the one where we created a backstory for a character as a group while discussing specificity. But, for my money, the workshop was the most valuable exercise we did.

8. A year from now, what will you remember from this class?

The value of having a writing group. Too-hot coffees from the stand outside the building. Wondering each night if I was going to get away with not having a parking pass. Dark walks to the bathroom around the corner. Curiosity about what the sign language class was talking about when I passed. That kid asking you about his Star Fox fan-fiction on the first night of class. Attendance dropping as the weeks went on. Recognizing that I probably needed to learn how to type with more than just my left index finger, right index finger, right middle finger, and right thumb. Getting back into the swing with Scrivener. Coming home totally jazzed about what we’d been doing in class and talking my poor wife’s ear off.

9. How was your experience of workshop? What did you learn from critiquing the work of your peers? What did you learn from getting the feedback of your peers?

Workshop was an incredibly valuable exercise for me. Getting feedback is great, even if the feedback itself isn’t what you want to hear. I mean, we all just want to be told how smart and how funny and how good looking we are, right?

It’s so easy to get stuck in your own head about parts of the work, and from there you have nowhere else to go. Just deeper into your own damn head. The workshop digs us out of that mire and keeps the wheels turning in a way that you just can’t do on your own. I also found that thinking about the other work helped me think about my work more critically. Maybe there’s something about getting into that mindset or maybe when we read other’s work, we are subconsciously looking for things that bug us about our own. Probably a little bit of both.

Regardless, I often had good breakthroughs on my work after dissecting the work of my group members. That is testament to the importance of having a writing group and not grinding things out in isolation. Perspective is key.

10. What are you most proud of? What were your personal writing “wins” this semester?

I am proud of the work I produced. It has been a long time since I’ve written and finished anything. Part of the point of enrollment was to shake off the cobwebs and I did that. No matter what comes of any of it, this has been valuable time spent honing my craft.