Bouncing back after creative hibernation

This is my first post in a while. Man, I wanted to just post a little something I’ve been banging out, then since the gap in contributions, I felt like I wanted to acknowledge it. But now I’m sitting down to write it and it feels heavy.

My last few posts were during a weird time in my life. In an attempt to spare the tedium, I had a change in my day job and I had finished my first draft of my Lewis & Clark script. The former was a little …jarring, and I wish I could say the latter was joyful and triumphant, but it turned out to be its own wave of emotion. 

I decided to take to my blog to try to process some of these emotions. Using the art of online publication to air out grievances can really mess with your website’s numbers, if that’s the kind of thing you’re paying attention to. I hadn’t started the blog to look at how many ‘clicks’ something got, but I let the numbers influence my dedication. 

Not only was I neglecting the blog, but my entire writing practice. I lost touch with a part of myself, and some other part of myself came in and started eating a ton of ice cream and got embarrassingly good at the new EA Skate video game…

I don’t know if I’m embarrassed about posting that stuff– reading it back, the tone is pretty heated and I can almost taste the fear. But, despite some concerns, I had a handful of folks reach out to express similar anguish and appreciation that they got to see someone else’s perspective about it. If it helped someone, even a little bit, I don’t really care that my precious stats went from dozens, sometimes hundreds, to a number closer to being more feasible to reserve a table at Parkside. The healing is worth it.

One thing I learned from all this is, no one wants to hear complaints from somebody this hot.

I’m really happy with the screenplay, and I’ve even made some significant edits to the first draft (more for marketability than anything else), and have still more. There’s multiple edges on this sword. I’m glad to still be working with it, ‘cause it's fun and people like hearing and talking about it, buuuut I wish it were done and some fairy-god producer pops out of nowhere to whisk me off to stardom and go hiking with Nick Offerman and he’ll propose to me under a waterfall to be my ‘Hollywood Uncle’ [ed note: ‘Hollywood Uncle’ sounds like a ‘gay thing’ [and we’re here for it!]].

Since I’m still shaking my magic eight ball on all that, in the interim I’ve had the tremendous pleasure of doing a full read through with my screenwriters group. It's full of amazingly bright, creative, talented, thoughtful, compassionate people, who provided feedback similarly described.

In my confused thrashing to try to jolt myself back into some sort of regular writing practice, I started a substack where I would post loosely (more like not at all) edited, less-than-hinged posts just to post something. But I wanted to get back to sharing more meaningful stuff in preparation for an UPCOMING PROJECT that I’m excited about…

I’m going to be posting here more, so check back soon, feel free to subscribe and share with someone you think would get some laughs out of it. The royal we have some big stuff planned, and I want at least a few people to go, ‘oh wow, he actually did it, and I was there from when he had like zero followers…’

My next post might just be a dump for how much I love italics.