As the Super Bowl rolls into our lives today I keep seeing stories of bitter Saints fans complaining about how their team was robbed because of a bad call. In my quick opinion, yes it was a bad call, but your defense still failed to stop the Rams on the next possession and that Brees interception didn’t happen because of a bad call.

Either way this whole thing has me thinking about taking accountability for one’s actions instead of focusing on someone else’s. Personally I do this far too much in my writing or more specifically, my lack of it.

I woke up too late, I got sidetracked on an errand, I watched TV, I browsed the web…the excuses pile up higher than my dirty laundry which will of course become another excuse.

It’s time as a writer and as a person to stop blaming the world and to start looking in the mirror. It’s not Game of Thrones’s fault I didn’t hit my page count today, it’s 100% me. And until I can wake up every day and remember that, life will just end up being a series of bad calls and I’ll never achieve my goals.

I’m a big fan of both, but only one gives me anxiety, which would be our dear friend writing. And so when I’m stressing out and wanting to quit I remind myself of how related they truly are.

When you are cooking a dish you think about what you want to make (idea), then you go to the cupboard or store and get the ingredients (characters, settings, basic plot), after that you follow a recipe (outline, beat sheet) and when it’s done you cook/eat it (publish). Sometimes it’s good, other times it’s inedible, but no matter what you know you’re going to be eating again in a few hours so you have to move on.

I’m sure I read this somewhere along the way and I wish I could credit the originator of this theory. Either way, it’s a very comforting analogy and one that gets me through a lot of tough spots. I love to cook, I do it almost every night for dinner and it calms me down after a long day of writing. Which makes it all the more ironic I suppose that I find the two tasks so similar. Cooking rarely stresses me out, so I look forward to the day when I can treat the two tasks equally.

Happy writing and happy eating 😉

I finally finished the first draft of my new book, The Children of the Screaming Church. Unfortunately, this draft is closer to being a major rewrite than a final version, but such is life. My characters are sounds, my dialogue is pretty good, but my plot is still not feeling right. What was that quote from the Big Lebowski, “Sometimes you eat the bar/bear and sometimes, well, he eats you.” So onwards and upwards to draft number two!

If you’ve come here, it was probably by accident or because your search for “manga tentacle porn” and the “daily struggles of a smart ass writer” met in the Google cosmos. Either way, I welcome you.

This blog isn’t designed to teach or share some sort of bountiful wisdom, it’s just to show you that there’s others out there like yourself. People who stare at the screen every day and in-between bouts of crippling depression, procrastination and multi-hour naps somehow get the work done.

You are not alone, even though while you’re reading this you probably are. Hmm. Ok, so maybe you are alone.

So faithful reader, I will try and post my daily adventures as boring as they might be and in the course of multiple weeks, days and years hopefully we can bond over the mundane, share our creative endeavors and have some fun doing it.

I’m also into motivational people, so I may share links to them from time to time and if I ever get my act together I’ll post more episodes of my podcast and movies I’ve made in the past. It’s a lot of work and as stated earlier, I have a lot of shit to overcome on a daily basis just to wake up, so quit riding me. I kid. See you soon.