Category: Musings

For the past month, I have been scaling the seemingly impossible summits of paperwork attendant to my life as a writer/director/producer/business owner/novelist. Boy, that’s a lot of slashes. We’re talking about dozens of forms from contracts for actors and directors, vendor agreements, tax paperwork, financial statements, and the list stretches on until it becomes a… Continue reading If You Need Me, I’ll Be Climbing Paperwork Mountain

Oscar Wilde wrote that “[m]emory...is the diary we all carry about with us.” Our memories are some of the strongest forces in our creative lives. They can shape plots, characters, scenes, topics, themes, anything we want to produce. Before I get too heavily in tying memory to writing, I want to tell a little story.… Continue reading Dear Diary

At a critique group meeting several years ago, one member expressed a concern common to all creative people.  He wanted his work to be “original.”  What did that mean?  What followed was one of the most interesting conversations I had on the idea of originality and what it takes to be a true original with… Continue reading A True Original

If there’s one piece of advice I could give to any aspiring writer, it’s finish something. As creative people, our heads will be constantly filled with unfinished projects, scraps of inspiration, little raggedy bits of ideas we glean from life. That’s how we create in the first place. But, and I hate to play the… Continue reading Follow Through

Most of us don’t go through life expecting a disaster. But sometimes, life takes a turn none of us were expecting. A frightening turn. A life-changing turn. For Ridgecrest and Trona, that turn came in the form of the July 2019 earthquakes. During the July meeting of my writers’ club, members expressed how hard it… Continue reading Sail On