There are many things I love about working with David Wright, but his sense of humor might just be my favorite. This showed up in my inbox yesterday, right out of nowhere and connected to nothing. I can’t stop laughing.

Starting today, and running for the next several weeks, Dave and I are running a series over at the Inkwell on our first year online. Today’s post is “The Lies Every New Blogger Believes.” Check it out!

Today is also the first of our daily posts over at Children Write the Future. We’re kicking off our Monday – Friday publishing with a post about “How to Write Stories With Your Children.” Enjoy, and see you tomorrow!

Writer Dad

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Our children will write the future. What they write will be largely up to us.

Cindy and I have been working on our Children Write the Future site for a really… er, REALLY long time now. Setback after setback, it’s sat in our lab, patiently waiting for the time when it could have the attention it so deserves.

One of our biggest desires is to build a high-quality online home where young writers and their parents can comfortably gather.

Starting this coming Monday, Children Write the Future will publish a continuously evolving stream of content, five days a week. However, we both believe it is often easiest to learn with consistency in place.

For the time being, the Children Write the Future schedule is as follows.

• Monday: We will start each week with writing tips for young and emerging writers that will both encourage them to become their best writers while also giving them the tools they need to make their writing as sharp as it can be.
• Tuesday: A writing prompt will be given each week to get those creative juices flowing.
• Wednesday: On Wednesday’s, Cindy and I will write a post together, discussing the most common roadblocks to writing, simple solutions, best practices and emerging trends.
• Thursday: Our 7 year old daughter Mia is going to be publishing her work each Thursday, along with the occasional guest post from another child. There are also whispers that Lucas Bright may make an appearance or two.
• Friday: A serialized excerpt from an upcoming book. Our first selection is, Penny to a Million, my first chapter book going to print, and a topic I’ll be talking a lot more about shortly.

We’ve also decided to gather each week’s information and publish it in a weekly newsletter, in an easy to digest format delivered directly to our subscriber’s inbox. It is 100% free and sent out each Friday.

You can sign up for the newsletter below right now. Otherwise, we’d love to see you at the site next Monday!

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“Dammit!”

I knew I should have pulled off sooner.

According to my directions I’m still a few miles shy of the Kodak Theater. I’m late for the conference, lost, and the emergency light on my fuel gauge has been lit for ten minutes.

I look left, then straight ahead, both directions showing nothing but a sea of stalled metal and red lights. I sigh, flick my blinker, then turn the steering wheel of the old Sienna right, cursing myself in every word I know in my native tongue, plus a few I know in others.

I shouldn’t have left Long Beach without gassing up.

I thought I could make it, left home with more than a quarter tank and only 30 miles to go. It was early, but LA traffic can be murder and I wanted to get into the heart of the city before the arteries clogged. The last 90 minutes spent at near standstill had reduced the tank to fumes. Now I was winding my way through the canyons of Mulholland Drive without direction in the vain hope I’d stumble upon a gas station before the Sienna started to sputter.

I suddenly smiled.

I remembered my miracle phone came complete with GPS. I pulled to the side of the road, which apparently angered the man in the black Escalade who gunned his engine and sat on his horn as he passed me.

I picked up the phone and hit the MAPS app, typing the word gas into the search field. A small map of the city appeared with one pin for me along with several other pins for gas stations dotted around my proximity, the closest of which was 0.4 miles away.

0.4 miles away!

It was almost spitting distance, but also in a place I never would have looked. Five minutes later and I was topping my tank and typing “Kodak Theater” into the Map. A neat blue line showed me exactly how to get from my A to B.

At lunch, I decided to get out of the theater and off for a walk. The streets of Hollywood are amusing after all. The Kodak is where the Academy Awards are held and sits directly next to the Mann’s Chinese Theater, where a riot of costumed panhandlers gather for passing attention. That day I saw Batman, Captain America, Shrek, Darth Vadar and Jack Sparrow, and that was just while I was descending the stairs. I stood on the corner and took out my phone. I knew where I wanted to go, just not how to get there. After listening to countless people over the previous two weeks telling me I needed to read Gary Vaynerchuck’s Crush It, I’d  finally decided to go to the book store and buy it.

I typed “Borders” into the map and it blinked back with a route, a half mile away.

Of all the things I expected to love about the iPhone, the Map feature wasn’t even on my radar. Perhaps it’s because my first several years behind the wheel were spent doing deliveries and as a result I’ve driven tens of thousands of miles while having to navigate my next move on the fly, or maybe it’s that I’ve lived in the same area my entire life. Could be I’m a dude and therefore allergic to asking for directions. For whatever reason, I love that now when I need directions, there’s a genie in my pocket that will help me and never tell anyone I needed to know.

Thanks for keeping my secret.

Writer Dad

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“The iPhone is the most sophisticated, outlook-challenging piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well and all so pleasurably.”
~ David Pogue, US technology writer as Apple’s new iPhone hits US shelves June 2007.

I’ve hedged on this post for a while. You see, I really don’t want to be that guy. I’m rather private about such things, and don’t think anyone needs to know what type of phone I slip in my pocket. One of the first things I did the day I got the phone was go into the settings so I could remove the little thingy that says, “sent from my iPhone” and sent an email to Dave asking if it showed up.

Thing is, I’ve been wanting an iPhone since they were only a whisper. As you may know, I have a borderline fetish for shiny products made by Apple and back when the iPhone existed only as rumor, I kept tab on the blather daily. I watched Steve Jobs give the keynote announcing Cupertino’s newest wonder five minutes after it went live, then made Cindy watch it with me later that night.

Unfortunately for me, the iPhone over delivered. It was far more phone than I could ever justify at the time. I ran a preschool and needed to check my email once a day at the most. Besides, I was a half solar system away from being able to afford a $500 phone, the cost for awesome when first unveiled. The last two and a half years have been kind to my needs. Now the iPhone is only $200 and I check my email in between blinks.

Anyone who knows me well has seen me get overhyped on something only to get woefully deflated once I experience it. This happens often with movies, but holds true with many other things as well. After a year and a half waiting for an iPhone, was it even possible for it to live up to my expectations?

I don’t think there’s ever been anything without a beating heart that’s managed to impress me more. The iPhone isn’t just the most remarkable piece of technology I’ve ever personally seen, I believe it is in many ways the future.

There’s something inevitable about the iPhone. It just works, and I believe certain elements of the gadget will not only make their way into the design of nearly every future phone to follow, but in operating systems in general. When I use the iPhone, it is easy for me to imagine Apple’s followup to OS X as a touch screen operating system based on the roots of everything the company has learned in designing their pocket device from the ground up.

I LOVE that everything on my desktop is synced in my pocket. I love that I have full access to every document I own at any time. But more than that, I love that iPhone knows how to volley with my brain. The iPhone operates on instinct and that is a remarkable thing.

I do believe there is a danger in having such a powerful tool in society’s pocket, but I’ll talk about that another time, perhaps next week. For now my iPhone is still shiny and I want to wax poetic as long as I can. I could go on and on (and to be honest, on and on some more) but you’ve been patient enough for today.

Tomorrow I’ll tell a story about how I got to use it’s awesomeness to save my hide last week in real life.

Writer Dad

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Today’s Deja Vuesday/old favorite takes us back to one year ago when some punk ass kid was outside my house uglifiying my corner more than it already was. In the year that’s passed, the neighborhood has continued its decay of comfortable apathy. It’s sad really; what could be one of the more romantic rows of our beautiful city, lined with vintage houses and hard working families has been mostly left to fester and rot.

Hopefully the sun will shine brighter on this zip code on some once upon a someday.

Enjoy!

“Cindy, I need you!” I’m out the door before she can answer, feet over the fence three seconds later.

“Hey!” I yell.

I stop in front of both of them, but grab the bigger one by the shirt as he’s walking away. He’s holding a fist full of labels swiped from the post office. A kindergartner’s logic paints his paws as red as the stop sign he just slapped a label on.

He shrugs me off and starts to walk off, his friend a beat behind. I grab his shirt, pull him toward me, then sidestep in front. “You’re going to clean that off, or you’re gonna wait with me until the cops get here.”

He stares.

I stare back.

The vandal’s a big kid, not used to being challenged. He’s somewhere between fifteen and seventeen, about six foot two. Maybe two-hundred and fifty pounds. He’s got about seventy-five pounds on me, but I’ve the advantage of an inch, and I press it on him like it’s the peak of a mountain.

“Two choices.”

He shrugs me off and gives me his shoulder, but I maneuver back in front. Silent, I produce my phone and hit the number for police, non emergency, our neighborhood enough decayed that the number is immediately accessible.

“Fine,” he says, walking toward the stop sign, “but it don’t come off.”

“It will come off.  The last time I scraped one of those stickers, it took me about half an hour. Though I’m probably faster than you.”

He stares, hate boiling.  ”I don’t have to do this,” he says.

“Then don’t.”

He stands on tip toe, and peels the sticker from the sign. When it’s gone, he scrapes the what’s left with the scraps of his nails. Every peer is peering, countless eyes are peeking from windows, trees, and alleys.

I stand on my corner, arms folded, watching him work, enjoying it far more than when I’m the one scraping. It took three years to get the four way stop sign put on our corner, and all of two days to get it tagged.

“I bet you wouldn’t have done that if your mama was watching,” I say.

“I just did it while my grandma was watching,” he boasts. There is genuine pride in his face, though it is clearly masking a different emotion.

“I hope she’s watching right now.”

The stop sign is shining and he turns to leave. “Don’t forget the trash can,” I said pointing to the can on the corner.

The small trash can came from the city. We first petitioned and then waited two years for its delivery. The trash can is our responsibility. We wipe it down and dump it every Friday. Yes, it is a filthy job, but still preferable to the era when we didn’t have the can and people used our yard, sidewalk and hedges instead. Since we’ve had the can, it’s suffered graffiti, frequent beatings with a baseball bat and intermittent detonations from fireworks stockpiled during the Fourth of July weekend. At the moment, I’m looking at a postal sticker splayed across the side. I didn’t see my new friend do it and don’t know for a fact he was the culprit, but it matters to me not at all.

He continues to stare, hatred now mingled with defeat, then peels the sticker from the trash can. It comes off easy. Just like they always do. I let him leave, but not without a final word. “You need to show respect around my property.”

“Which one’s yours?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah,” he sneers.

“The whole corner,” I say.  ”Anything in eyesight of my kids.”

He walks away and I turn back to the house.

I’m being watched by Cindy, what feels like the entire neighborhood, and our final client of the day standing on our porch and waiting to pick up his son. I wonder what he’s thinking, but then I see the applause on his face and meet it with a smile, relief deep in my bones.

We live in an ancient houses in the oldest part of our city. The neighborhood was overcrowded to start with and has continued to brim. We nurture our corner each day and have helped it to improve  since we planted a flag in our preschool three years back.

Neighborhoods are ecosystems of life, filled with all types of people. Life advances with effort and deteriorates with apathy. Income means nothing and manners are free. I believe in my neighborhood (always have), but the mothers and fathers of today should be paying more attention to the mothers and fathers of tomorrow.

Writer Dad

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I‘m so excited for a brand new Monday, a new week of opportunity to catch up after the duo of conferences and raging illness that chased them like an angry banshee. I’m much better now, but it’s been a while since I felt that beat.

I normally think of sick as involving lots of liquids in plenty of places, but this was a different and rather dry sort of agony. I felt as though someone took my bones and replaced them with pain while an army of tiny spiders with fire for blood laid their eggs in the meat of my throat.

I went to dinner with my friend Jimmy after the conference on Wednesday. Jimmy was my brother growing up, but I now see him about as often as I buy a new car. Jimmy owns a production company and works in Hollywood. I have two children and live in Long Beach. Our worlds orbit in affection, but rarely intersect. Wednesday was awesome; we were in the same city at the same time and a dinner date was as easy as a phone call.

We sat at our table until I was sure I had waited out the traffic, a good call considering the same trip that had taken me two hours and ten minutes the day before took me thirty-two minutes that night. I got home, went to bed smiling, and woke up the next day feeling as though I’d fallen from the tree of torment and been slapped in the face by every branch on the way down.

And that’s the way it was for the next two days. I started feeling slightly better on Saturday morning, though not enough to go forward with my earlier plans for Halloween. My friend Roberto called to ask when we’d be over and I said we’d be sending a triangle of family instead of a square. After fifteen minutes or so of feeling like I was telling him the Great Pumpkin didn’t exist, and him promising me I could lie on the couch and do nothing while he made me tea for my throat that was sure to make me feel like I was being kissed by angels, I agreed to come over as long as I didn’t take a turn for the worse.

By the time of departure I felt no better or worse and didn’t want to disappoint anyone, so I climbed into the car as passenger rather than driver and we were off to Halloween. Fortunately, I didn’t have to dress up. Going along with the Star Wars kick my kids have been on, we all went as a favorite character. Cindy and Mia were both different versions of Leia. Max was an awesome little Darth, with a helmet about nine times to big for his tiny face. He swam in it like Rick Morannis as Dark Helmet in Spaceballs. I went as an all purpose Jedi, my costume consisting of the most comfortable bottoms in my dresser below a well worn chocolate colored cotton tee, all wrapped in a bathrobe.

I was bummed to miss out on the trick-or-treating. I’ve always loved it, never really grown out of it, and each year feel like an old fogey for thinking the holiday just isn’t the same as it used to be. But it was awesome to lie on the couch listening to friends and family having fun. I was grateful for the warmth of the house and happy I didn’t decide to stay home and end up missing it.

After the trick-or-treating ended, I fell into what were two of the longest hours of my life. My full sick came back to stare me in the eyes, demanding to know who I thought I was that I could leave the house just because it was Halloween. My skin started to burn over my icy cold insides as my bones rattled beneath the blanket. All four of my limbs felt like they were being pulled apart by wild bucking horses and you could have easily filled a soup bowl by ringing out my tee-shirt.

Every minute felt like ten until time finally fell back into its normal rhythm. Some sudden victory was apparently won inside the depths of my body and a fraction of my strength returned.

Though my throat is still raw and it does feel as though planes are trying to land on a runway between my ears, I am otherwise fine. I feel reasonably strong and eager for the week.

Halloween was as awesome as it could have been considering and I’m already excited for next year!

Writer Dad

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This was a Halloween poem Dave and I did last year. It was one of our very first collaborations ever, you can even see we used the name Collective Inkwell at the bottom, almost a half year before the site went live. I thought it would be fun to run the poem again for Halloween.

Enjoy!

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Ugh.

I’m sick.

Like every bone in my body aching, burning the cool of my pillow and have no idea if I should sit or stand over the toilet – SICK.

Not sure if it was Vegas or the 140 Character (Twitter) Conference in LA that finally did me in, but I’m utterly spent and uber behind.

We only had a couple of Vegas questions, so I’ll knock those out now.

Trina: Yes, Vegas was a terrific venue for the event, and no, it wasn’t too distracting. I didn’t particularly care for the night club scene, but you could pick and choose the attended events and that worked well for me. The convention center was spacious and there were plenty of restaurants and hot spots for meet-ups afterwards.

George: I met lots of people, but the most rewarding for me were Brian Clark and Naomi Dunford. I was happy to find them both exactly who I hoped they would be. I don’t like being disappointed in people and it was one of my early fears in attending the conference. I’d have to say no, I didn’t exactly learn anything new, but I did many of my thoughts crystalized in the best way possible and the rampant eye contact was awesome. My blogging will continue to evolve as it has since I started last year, but if there’s a single takeaway I had from the conference it’s that I’m not a “blogger,” I’m a businessman who happens to use blogs as just one of many effective online tools. P.S. George, I have been reading your site and think you may be certifiably insane.

Kool Aid: It was terrific to finally meet Eric in person. One of the highlights of the weekend was having a late dinner at the Venetian, just the two of us. We were sitting at the Mirage, in a smoky black nightclub with cocktail waitresses that looked like they’d been blown up with a bicycle pump. It took us all of ten minutes to blow that joint, then stroll the strip until we hit the Venetian, which is one of my favorite places and also happens to be where Cindy and I got married. I had a chicken meatball sandwich and awesome conversation to cap off a really cool day.

Vegas was a lot of fun and I’m already looking forward to South by Southwest in spring. I’m hoping to get Dave to go, so if anyone wants to start nagging him now, that would be awesome.

Thank you so much to everyone who voted for me on the Good Mood Gig. Your support was awesome! However, with only a week to go and a couple thousand votes shy of the top 20, I’m pulling out and asking that if you were voting for me, please go ahead and vote for Tracy O’Connor. She’s awesome and got me involved in the first place. Same as before, votes take just 4 seconds but could have a GINORMOUS impact on her life.

Thanks, and see you next week!

Writer Dad

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I’ll answer questions tomorrow. Right now I’m sitting in my seat at the 140 Character Conference listening to Mark Victor Hanson (the Chicken Soup for the Soul dude) talk about Twitter. Fascinating stuff for sure. Most of the speakers have one thing in common – they’re talking about changing the world.

Here are my thoughts.

Changing the world is a steady endeavor.

Scrolling through history, it would be impossible to find a single soul who woke up, decided they would change the world, then celebrated with a glass of wine later that evening. Those who change the world do it drip by drip, like coffee into a pot until it’s full enough to pour.

You do not need to shift the plates of humanity in order to make a difference. Some people change the world by prodding along another who will one day introduce the planet to a thought it’s not yet had, or invent the widget the world’s been waiting for to nudge itself forward.

Often, those who change the world never set out to do so. Big or small, the next subtle shift could be triggered by you. Day by day, drop by drop, the future is undecided.

How much impact would you like to have?

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Today’s post is written by Kool Aid. No, that’s not her real name and no she isn’t going to share it with you. She only told me because I told her I don’t allow guest posts from giant pitchers of dyed sugar water that are likely to punch through one of my walls. Oh yeah.

It’s not too late to jump to Monday’s post and ask questions either about Vegas or questions for Max and Mia.

Thanks and I hope you enjoy!

The awesome photo is taken by Kool Aid of a knife she actually made.

Capturing an idea is often like gathering lightning, as Writer Dad once wrote so beautifully.

Developing that idea, however, is something else entirely. Sometimes it is a steel blank, forged in the flames of creativity; heated and hammered and pounded against the anvil through sweat, muscle and sometimes even crimson blood and salted tears.

That idea slowly surfaces over time as effort gives form to thought.

While working on my BFA in Metal Design, some creative ideas came quickly while others had to be coaxed. Sometimes putting pencil to paper to sketch those 3-dimensional designs of wood or metal was a challenge. We were taught to keep working, to think outside the box, to push an idea further and further. Often, these strategies led to an amazing piece of art; other times they were only exercises in frustration which never allowed me to leave the two dimensions of the doodled page.

I have boxes and drawers heaped with unfinished work; tarnished, scratched and waiting for that last bit of polish and gleam.

But then there’s a spark of an idea and the creative forge is built. Head, hands and heart team to breathe life and fire into the idea and a work of art, a fine metal blade, emerges.

The final stage of making a knife is sharpening that blade. Microscopic metal teeth align perfectly to cast a razor-sharp edge. Both the idea and the knife reach a point where the work is done; you just have to recognize when to stop.

It’s hard, sometimes, when you keep visualizing that last and final piece required to make it “perfect.” You keep pushing and pushing, adding, editing, making changes. You sharpen that blade long past the razor’s edge. The idea gets dragged out and you realize, at some point along the way, you pushed too far and perhaps stripped too much of the metal. You step back and see bits of shavings and dust littering the table and floor and discover that your work – that fantastic idea you’ve been so diligently working on – is losing itself in your quest for perfection.

That spark of creativity is a lifelong learning process. Knowing when to allow the idea to simply exist as a single bolt of lightning, take the time and effort to forge it into something else and then knowing when to rest are all skills developed over time and experience.

In your creativity, are you honing that fine edge or just shaving away bits of metal?

Drink more Kool Aid at Butterflies in my Hand

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