Moving Along

Well, it's been a couple of weeks since I started this blog, so I figure it's time for an update. One of my primary tasks is finding a market to pick up some of the stories I wrote for Escape, the magazine that went belly-up in such a timely fashion the SAME week I decided to go freelance.

After a rough week marked by sleeplessness and a long day sitting at my desk thinking, oh shit, I'm going to be living in a cardboard box a year from now, begging for handouts on the street, I made a little progress on making this screwball dream a reality.

I managed to place one and maybe two of my stories written for the now-dead Escape with Motorcyclist, which is positive. That magazine has a much bigger circulation, so I'll get a bit more exposure. I have two others to sell, and pitched variations of one about a ride with enduro legend Dick Burleson to Men's Health and AARP (insert age joke here--the second is not about ME but about Dick, who's 58 and still living life at full-throttle, to say the least).

Oh, and I also put together a portfolio using the "book" feature in iPhoto. What an amazing program--I did that in about three hours and it looks great. So I've got something to show--now I just need plenty of people to show it to!

One of the best things was having some of my vague notions about what kind of books I want to write forming into more concrete ideas. I think profiles of people who are finding ways to live that are satisfying and creative and outside of mainstream America are interesting, and would be interesting to this homogenized world we live in, but was struggling to find a way to make a book out of that notion. Then I started thinking about the common threads in two innovative, creative people I met while working on books, and realized that both of them built amazing businesses and things in their garage, and thought there's probably a book of profiles and stories about people creating amazing things out of their garage. My publisher, Zack, really likes that idea, and we hammered out a book idea around that this morning.

So that's a big plus this week, another small step in the right direction.

Other than that, life is proceeding normally which means, as of late, a lot of work. I teach and spent the evening refining my class plan. The students are bright and interesting, and the college (Minnesota College of Art and Design) is a place that feels much more hopeful and upbeat than the publishing company where I work (for now). I suppose there's a needed dose of reality at the publishing house, but I like the youthful energy of a college. It's a place where anything seems possible.