Questions to Ask Adela (a short story)
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten a short story published… To be honest, I was second-guessing whether I still remembered how to write a damn short story. 😭 I’m excited to tell you that my story QUESTIONS TO ASK ADELA is now online at Flash Fiction Magazine! 🎉 If you want to jump right to it, here’s the link. 📗 If you want more info about my writing process, read on. ✍️ And if you don’t care about any of this crap 💩, then why did you get this far into the post!?
Do It in Your Own Awkward Messy Way: Tears of the Kingdom Review (video)
So I got obsessed with yet another video game. 🕹️ This time it’s Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It’s a hell of a game—maybe the best game I’ve ever played—and this video is about how it has affected my creative mindset. (I mean, I needed some excuse to connect video gaming with my novel writing!) Also, you get to see some of the awful failed vehicles that I attempted to create in the game… 🚀💥
I’m a failure!… And I love it! (video)
It’s easy to analyze my creative ventures and come to the conclusion that they are failures. 😩 And it used to be easy for me to conclude that I was failure as well. 😭 But I’m not a failure… I was just looking at the wrong numbers. 📉📈 I love what I’m up to… ❤️️ And here’s a video where I talk it all through… 😜
Present Before the Future: Chronic Pain & Creativity (video)
There’s been something on my mind lately about how I approach my chronic pain (migraines! 🤕) that has similarities to my approach with creative projects (writing! ✍️ YouTubing! 📽️ coding! 👨💻 podcasting!). It relates to the distinction between future-focused issues 🔮 and present-focused issues 🧘. And so I tried to capture it in this video…
a fuzzy reflection on my creative life (video)
I'm not so into new year's resolutions 🎉, but I still wanted to awkwardly think through my attitude (mostly around my creative life) 🧑🎨 in 2022, and whether it needs to change in 2023 🌪️😭 (beyond just using fewer emoji in place of real feelings)…
Prompts: A Simple Storytelling Exercise (that I'm giving away for free)
For some context, I need to explain two things. First of all, for my day job (as a technical writer), someone asked me to facilitate an icebreaker exercise for 80 people (both online and onsite). Separate from that, I volunteered to facilitate a creative writing workshop. For both of these exercises, I started gathering all my favorite writing prompts, especially the ones that could also be conversation starters. I decided to create a web page on my site that displayed random prompts to get people telling stories. The exercises worked well enough that I decided to leave this page up for anyone to use.
The Fuzzy Secrets to Writing a Decent Novel (video)
It’s been on my mind lately how the act of writing (and completing) a decent novel requires some particular qualities beyond just learning the craft of writing. And so here is a fuzzy video about the fuzzy art of writing a NON-fuzzy novel. 🌪❤️️
On Writing with Chronic Migraines
My essay on chronic pain and creativity is featured in Catapult Magazine this week. 🤕 Here’s an excerpt: “It’s hard to explain chronic pain to someone who doesn’t experience it, the way the physical pain blurs together with the psychological toll it takes. I mean, the actual pain is plenty painful—sometimes so bad that it’s hard to want to live. But a lot of the time it’s more about the accumulation of the pain. It’s like listening to that leaf blower outside that isn’t too annoying for one minute but grows maddening after two hours. It’s hard to imagine that the leaf blower will ever stop. Or when it does stop for a moment, you’re just brooding, worrying, waiting for that asshole to start it up again.” 🤕 To read more about my chronic pain, and my chronic creativity, and my dislike of leaf blowers, click the link in this post.
The Spectrum of Metafiction (Interview in Bomb Magazine)
Wendy J. Fox, author of the fabulous short story collection WHAT IF WE WERE SOMEWHERE ELSE interviewed me for Bomb Magazine. We talked about tech lingo, parenting, metafiction, emoji vs. emoticons, writing about a writer as a way to write, and a bunch of other fun and crooked topics.
8 musical shorts from an insecure writer (video)
About a year ago, somewhere in the dark corridors of 2021, I got stuck in my creative life. At the same time, I knew that my novel was going to come out with Red Hen Press in 2022 and I wanted to keep creating things. So what I did was take some of the basic stuff I learned about music from my friend Joey Helpish, along with some of the struggles I was feeling about the creative process… and I made eight, short, awkward, animated music videos about my creative struggles. In the past few weeks I’ve posted them on TikTok and Instagram, but since I totally don’t know what I’m doing on those platforms, I also compiled them together into one video (with some explanations between songs) for YouTube. And here it is. 📽📽📽
Book Launch Day!
🤯😵💫 OK. Holy shit. My book is officially out the door today! I ONLY CRY WITH EMOTICONS with Red Hen Press. I can't believe the day has arrived. I can't tell you how many people I should thank for this. It takes a community to write a book as far as I can tell. Thank you to all the dear people. For more info about the book, check out my book page. (And the latest episode of the Neurotic Tornado 😫🌪 podcast covers stage fright, book launch nerves, and a bizarre peeing nightmare. We also invite Jackie Shannon Hollis to talk about her public speaking experience with her memoir, This Particular Happiness out with Forest Avenue Press.)
#️⃣🔢 In the meantime, here are some crazy statistics about writing I ONLY CRY WITH EMOTICONS for you to ponder:
Publishing Purgatory & Pants
I've lost my focus. I have a book coming out in two months and I have no idea where to put my attention. It feels like I'm doing nothing and everything at once. I’m working on too many things but don’t know which things are the most important.
So let me list out the pieces of my messy month and see if I can come out the other side with some insight that could be useful for anyone, regardless of what kind of month you've had…
Arthur Morgan and the Hero’s Journey (video)
I forget, who was asking me to make a FORTY-MINUTE VIDEO about how the hero's journey storytelling structure works in a 2018 video game called Red Dead Redemption 2? Oh, no one? Well, shit. My bad, because I spent a TON of hours working on this damn video. I've tried to make it accessible to non-gamers who are curious about storytelling in a modern video game (a game that happens to have an amazing narrative).
every draft has a purpose (video)
So here’s an approach to working through each draft that has been helpful to me. I’m not sure if it’s helpful to others or if it’s obvious or something else… All I know is that it was tiring to change my shirt so many times in order to demonstrate each draft in this video…
miscellaneous thoughts about my insecurities with publishing things
A few months ago, I posted about how I missed blogging. I wrote it as if blogging was dead, as if I wasn't writing those words on MY OWN BLOG... It wasn't until I got some feedback (thank you, Betsy! 😜) along the lines of, "so... why not keep blogging!?" that I realized there's nothing stopping me from posting things in just the way I once loved to do.... Nothing stopping me, except for me. But ME is a pretty difficult force to overcome. I’m so nervous about saying something the wrong way, or someone reading it the wrong way, or regretting something I say… 😱 To the point where I freeze up at the keyboard when I’m writing something specifically meant for a blog or for social media. It all feels a lot scarier and more complicated these days…
you should consider quitting (video)
Oh! I forgot to tell you that, a few weeks ago, I made a video about quitting... Or, not really quitting, but how I think about quitting... Or maybe it's more about whether it's worth quitting… Or maybe… You know what? Just watch the damn video.
the blog experience
I've been thinking about blogging. Not about blogging today, but just what it felt like to blog a bloggy blog post fifteen years ago. Until 2009, I had a blog on blogger.com and it was magical, just how easy it was to put words down in a post. Not quite a journal entry, and not quite journalism, but just this informal way to tell your story. Putting out these breadcrumbs for people to follow, to learn more about you, and whatever you were obsessed with that week. And then, the next week (or the next day, or the next month), you could continue along that trail with another post. You didn't have to think about any fancy website stuff or submitting your crazy consciousness for publication on some magazine's website. It felt so fresh and free.
Y'all know by now that I don't blog regularly anymore. I average about one post every two months, and typically I'm just using the post to point to some other video or project. I don't know when or why those chatty blog posts stopped for me. And in the meantime, blogging has become a less cool thing to do. Maybe because social media has filled that need. But I never got comfortable posting the same kind of content on social media. Social media feels so chaotic and noisy — and everybody's voices are all smashed together. The blog was my own stage to tell my own story in my own way. And then I could happily go visit your blog and listen to your unique voice on your unique stage.
I miss the blog experience.
acknowledgments (video)
So I thought it would be amusing to create a video where I make fun of myself attempting to write the acknowledgments for my book. But in the process of making fun of myself, I mistakenly stumbled into a sincere desire to stop and appreciate the things that allow me to be creative. So here's a video that's a mish mash of all those feelings…
the insecurities of one writer (video)
So I've had this sorta-close-to-ready video sitting on my laptop for over two years now. It's about various voices in my head that make me insecure as a writer. The thing about the video is that I don’t think I quite strike the right tone. It's a little too cheesy, but also a little too dark, but also not quite funny enough, and it has 12% more cursing than usual. So I guess I'm insecure about my video... that’s about my insecurities about my writing. And now, a few years later, I'm totally busy with other things, and I don't have what it takes to revisit this video and get it to the proper finish line. On the other hand, there’s something about this video that still speaks to me. I don't want to just throw it into the (digital) fire. So, I did what any mediocre YouTuber would do, I pooped out this messy content for the world to see anyhow.
make something terrible (video)
I recently got some insight into my creative process from my kid's music teacher… who is now, somehow, my music teacher… even though I previously had no skill or interest in music. But he's really more of a creative mentor. The work we do goes from making music to making videos to managing time better, and it even informs my writing process. And how to worry more effectively. So I thought I could share with you some of the ideas I've gotten from his teaching style that have helped me with my creative life, and my... life life.