2023/24 In Review and What's Next

Me on Lake Michigan, enjoying some frosty Januray weather!

Well its been two long years since I've given my Christmas card update. In a busy rush of moving three times, falling in love, getting married, and switching jobs multiple times, I can probably say there's alot to catch people up on.

Lets rewind to February 2022. After hitting teacher burnout very severely during the end of the pandemic, I decided to move back in with my parents for a while while I found seasonal work and focused on my art. 2022 was very difficult for me, not because I wasn't getting things done, but because I was fatigued and exhausted with life, my circumstances, and the growing sense of emptiness that was beginning to find its way into my art. By the end of the year, I had finally relocated from Denver, Colorado to Grand Junction, a small town on the other side of the state in an attempt to find solace and escapism in the desert.

That's how 2023 started. Filled with enthusiasm and a compelling sense of accomplishment, I spent Christmas stuck in a snowbank and New Years day on a remote county road attempting to loosely follow a lead I'd gotten on some petrified wood the size of a dinner plate, which I never ended up finding. But I was happy. Finally having some space from Denver, which I was considered the "big city" in my life at the time, I felt free and alone to pursue my naturalist passions and embrace a side of myself that had been dormant since my travels in the Middle East so many years ago. I spent my time wandering desert washes looking for fossils and fun desert finds. I was alone. I was at peace. And as fate would have it, that's when things finally got interesting.

The job I had accepted in order to move to Grand Junction was at a children's museum, and I was incredibly thrilled to be there. Unfortunately, however, their leadership was inept, and at the end of March, only 4 short months after they had enthusiastically hired me from a city 150 miles away, they let me go. The reason? "It just wasn't the right fit for us".

Nice.

Anyways, so by April I was looking for a job, and spending much time reminiscing about things that once were or could have been. On April 11th, I contacted an old friend out of the blue to say hello. She wasn't someone I knew very well but was someone I remembered fondly from a trip many, many years ago, and she is one of those rare people you only meet a few times in life. After I reached out, she reached back, and before long we were texting each other and video calling regularly. Long story short, our connection was obvious and our videos calls got longer and longer as we both began to feel something special.

By June I flew out to meet her in Chicago, and by October I was packing up to move to Chicago. Third job in a year, two years in a row. All this time I was working steadfast on my creative writing mind you, but I wasn't getting much done seeing as I was in love. One thing lead to another and pretty soon we were engaged and married in a wonderful online ceremony that broke the bounds of tradition and went from ring to wedding in record time.

And now, after many more months living happily with my beautiful wife, we are both back in Colorado where my creativity is back at its peak and I've had ample time to settle in, become imaginative, and continue working on my art once again.

This year saw the release of several new micro fictions and poetry, and 2023 saw a handful of small releases and additional content. Now, after a year long hiatus from updates and a most of my writing, I am proud to say that I have landed my first book deal, set to release sometime in 2026. Its a Colorado local history piece about a topic I am passionately familiar with, and while I can't say much about it now, I look forward to sharing more in the future and for working with the team over at Fonthill Media to accomplish this passion project.

Last but not least I want to say that I am also still hot in the query trenches for a children's picture book (titled "Pink Is The Only Color You Need"), as well as late drafting stages for another picture book (Ava, Who Lives With Spiders), as well as working on the comic script for a debut graphic novel about the state of modern politics in the West, which has changed titles from "Americans In Space" to "America 2350: The Motion Picture", a much more fitting title seeing that the theme is "American politics on display for all the world to see". I have notes in progress for many, many other works, including my long alluded to book about the first civilization, but for now am focusing alot more on these other works as I get experience under my belt and grow my audience slowly from seed to sapling. In any case, I have been busy, and am very excited to show off to the world what I can do once some of these other works get underway.

But for now, I'm just enjoying the married life, taking life as it comes and awaiting that special day when I breakout these works to the world. Right now I'm just a man with a Wix site, and about 6 or 7 works to my name. Tomorrow, however...

...well, only time will tell.

Ciao.