I began my creative life the way many sensible careers begin: making comics in high school and assuming this was a perfectly reasonable long-term plan. When drawing alone proved insufficiently public, I escalated to self-publishing a satirical newspaper, which combined jokes, opinions, and the quiet confidence of someone who had never yet been ignored by an audience.

College arrived and with it short stories, written largely to avoid doing anything more employable. I was interested in voice, structure, and the small humiliations of being human, though at the time I would have said I was “experimenting.” In my twenties I discovered screenwriting, a form that promised order, collaboration, and the comforting illusion that there were rules. I wrote dozens of screenplays, many of them earnest, several of them bad, all of them necessary. Some led to short films, which taught me how quickly ambition meets gravity once a camera is involved.

Eventually, I attempted a feature film. It did not get finished. This remains one of my more efficient educations. Undeterred, or possibly unaware, I continued making short films and drifted into experimental video, where failure feels more intentional and therefore easier to live with. I circled back to my beginnings by writing a graphic novel, rediscovering that pictures and words still argue better together.

More screenplays followed, now with slightly fewer illusions and better instincts. I went on to write pilots for Disney, a sentence that sounds impressive and still surprises me. Across all of this, the pattern is consistent: a refusal to stop, a willingness to change forms, and a belief that the next thing might finally be the one that works, or at least fails interestingly.