I wrote my first short story in fourth grade. It was called “The Lost Puppy,” and told the story of a puppy who felt displaced when a kitten joins the household. By the end of the two-page tale, the two became fast friends and everyone lived happily ever after. From that point on, I considered myself a writer.
Making “Killer From Space,” my first movie.
By eleven years old, I also considered myself a filmmaker, and decided that’s what I wanted to do. I studied filmmaking in college, and set off on a career focused primarily on non-fiction media – producing or editing documentaries, promotional and educational programming.
But I still considered myself a writer. I worked in a creative field, after all, and everything I did was related to storytelling. I still wrote as a hobby, though, creating screenplays and short stories over the years. I won a few awards and recognition for several of my screenplays, and even adapted one or two into short films. My current novel, “My Life at the Bottom of the Food Chain,” in fact, first came to life as an award-winning screenplay in 2005. It even won best comedy in a scriptwriting competition.
You might assume that I would take that success, and others like it, as motivation to shop the screenplay around Hollywood for a couple of years, just to see what would happen. I didn’t though. As much as I enjoyed writing, the idea of spending years working on a project, and then years more shopping it around, hoping that a publisher or producer might find value, simply held no appeal . I had no interest in being a starving artist.
But now, things have changed. If I want to bring my work to an audience, I can. I am my own gatekeeper. If I create quality content, and can create word-of-mouth marketing to help promote that content, then I can reach a wide audience. That’s why I finally wrote “My LIfe at the Bottom of the Food Chain,” and finally began my writing career.
