My Nightmare Before Christmas (Writing Something That Scares Me)

In 2015, I can count on practically one hand how many blog posts I’ve written here:

Six. Only six.

Well, five actually, since one of them, “A Ferris Bueller Kind of Day Off,” a piece I wrote after I sprained my ankle pretty severely during a Top Gun high velocity volleyball match with my Indiegogo coworkers, which kept me off the sand for half the season, I reposted on my Medium page as “A Ferris Bueller Kind of Day Off (Or, Lessons Learned From a Sprained Ankle)” to see if I’d get more hits there than on this WordPress (old school, I know) blog.

Although now that I think of it, it may only be four blog posts, because “Calling All Trigonauts! (‘Cause ‘Trigonaut’ Sounds Cooler Than ‘Intern’)” isn’t really a blog post, but a call to action for me to seek out a Trigonaut (like an astronaut, but more Trigonian or something like that…) to help me take the crowdfunding sage side of me to the next level. This yielded a few prospects, but no one I could necessarily let run with a ball that encompasses a rather large portion of my current identity.

For me, this year has been a year of experimentation. Too often writers, filmmakers, and artists of all sorts start to rest on the laurels we have instead of trying to earn new ones by trying something new. By attempting to do something different or innovative, even if we fail it’s fine because we had the guts to attempt it, and hopefully we did so to the best of our present abilities. Because even if we did succeed, the next thing we do should is something else that shadows that most recent of triumphs. That’s how we grow. And this year, I’ve certainly grown.

I know I’ve grown despite the fact that I feel I’ve done significantly less with my time than perhaps any other year before this one, as evidenced by this fifth, sixth, or seventh blog post you’re reading right now. Why have I been away from the blogosphere since August, you ask? (Well, I hope you’re asking!) Well, ironically, I’ve been busy! Here are a few things that have kept me occupied over the year:

• At the start of the year, I was spending much of my free time working on The Muddled Mystery of the Murdered Muse, book one in the “Sebastian Holden, P.I.” mystery novel series I’ve been tapping into my iPhone’s Notes since 2013 during my morning and evening commutes. I stopped revising it mid-way partly because I showed my highly stylized proposal to my most excellent friend and former university colleague Jim Broderick, and he proceeded to hand my metaphorical arse to me with his no bullshit, very constructive but also very deconstructive critique.

• It was also partly because my friend and illustrator Lauren Clemente informed me that our first ever comic book Siren’s Calling –– was finished after four long years of scripts and sketches and social media. This became my top priority, and after a successful Thunderclap to get our six-page preview into as many hands as possible and an equally successful Indiegogo to do a print run of issue #1, this first chapter of our horror noir story will make one hell of a splash in 2016.

• I finally started meditating. That takes time. (Five minutes a day, but it is time, nonetheless.)

• Then, I got an email from Ken Lee, editor at Michael Wiese Productions, the company that published my book Crowdfunding for Filmmakers: The Way to a Successful Film Campaign back in 2013, and they asked me if I’d be interested in writing a second edition, to which I replied “absolutely.” I gave myself a total of four months to completely revamp the book and add in their required 30% worth of new content. (It’s actually more like 45% new content.) I then delivered the manuscript on time on November 2^nd, and I’m currently waiting for my scrupulous editor Gary Sunshine to finish red-penning my work so I can give it one more rewrite before it’s published and on shelves in summer of 2016.

• I’ve been getting “lost” in Lost. Yes, the TV series that I admitted to my coworkers that I’d never seen an episode of, to which they replied “you need to watch Lost.” And so I am, and I’m hooked and currently caught up to Season Four.

• And I’ve also been writing more crowdfunding blog posts for the Indiegogo Blog and my own Medium page, have taken on the role of Head of Marketing and Distribution for my fiancée’s large format quarterly EIGHTY, and I’ve been getting more involved in the local arts and culture scene in Jersey City, attending poetry readings, and for every eight hours I work for Indiegogo, I work at least three for me everyday.

So I guess I have done quite a bit this year, even though, to me, it doesn’t quite feel like I have.

Back in my college days, in all the creative writing classes I’d ever taken, there was always this one staple of a writing exercise, and it was called “Write Something that Scares You.” I can’t remember if I first read it in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones or Wild Mind. Or perhaps it was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I know it was an exercise in a book called The Practice of Poetry. Whenever I first encountered it, I remember scoffing at the idea. Until I did it. Until I really did it, and I felt the change that confronting one’s fears in a little piece of writing could cause. The catharsis. The release of all that society tells you never to put out into the world.

I’m remembering this because one thing I’ve always been scared of has been slowing down in my productivity. This year, at least in my mind, that fear was realized. And it bothered me for a while. Am I burnt out? I thought to myself. Washed up? Is time finally killing me because I took a little time to kill? Of course not. I’m merely following the Paths that was laid out before me –– the comic being finished; getting the gig to write the second edition of my book; becoming Lost to find new creativity I may have temporarily lost sight of within me.

In truth, the fear was not realized. It was met with eyes wide open. I faced it head on!

So while the fledgling blogger in me feels as though I’ve let you, my readers, down a bit this year by publishing only a child-sized handful of posts, rest assured that 2016 will not only be an important year for my professional writing, but also for yielding some entertaining and informative bits of content that I had wanted to share this year, but alas, Time, she got the better of me in 2015. (Although, I did have quite a hit on my hands with my prior post “Hitting the Writer’s Block (And Breaking Right On Through It),” so thank you to all of you who read, liked, and shared this one!)

We’re all our own worst critics, I know, and while I’m certain you’re all happy to have read a few decent pieces from me this year, next year I’m resolved to post one blog post a month (at least). Until then, I hope you enjoyed this one and some of the things I’ve linked out to, and remember –– before this year ends, do something that scares you.

And then, tell me all about it.