It’s been two months too long since my past post. This isn’t a unique statement, but the pandemic caused me to bunker down a bit more than usual. Work picked up, and I ended up spending more hours at the day job (working from home, of course) because ad rates were low and the revenue return was good. This led to a chain reaction of tiring myself out, which was fueled by how little sleep I allowed myself night after night. As a result, I fell into a funk (and not the good kind).

When overtired and without sleep, my mind goes to dark places. I bear the weight of my role within society. That is to say, when I’m tired, I’m suddenly aware of how inconsequential I am to the world at large. But I’ve been writing my way out of it. After a week or two of wallowing, I threw my feelings in my robot character that I’ve been working and retooling over the past three or four years. I’ve introduced him before. His name is Rocket, and he is a machine cog in a human world. You can read more about him here.

I also quit procrastinating on sleep and gifted myself a few more hours every night. It’s done wonders. Truly. But this update isn’t about me being sad. It’s about the dream. It’s about the main goal I’ve carried with me for years.

Whatever happens with my writing in the years to come will happen. People will read it, or they won’t. It’ll entertain and inspire others out there, particularly younger writers and readers, or it won’t. It’s not the fame or the notoriety that I’m after. In truth, I want an action figure.

One of my hobbies is collecting action figures (Batman, Godzilla, a zombie army, etc.). I have shelves devoted to my collections, and I find myself staring at these shelves whenever I need that creative burst of inspiration. I just love the imagination and design that went into crafting these things. Someone’s dreams fueled this merchandise, and through a long process – from an idea on paper to screenplay to film/comic to licensing deal to plastic mold – this dream manifested itself in my living room.

That’s fascinating to me. It’s inspiring to know that love for someone’s creation reached such a level that another creative made a little plastic mold of it, and I’d love for one day to have an action figure of my own creation sitting on my shelf, staring back at me.

There’s a satisfaction in knowing that if I have a figure of something I created, surely someone else out in the world has one too. It means that someone else carries that creative magic now. The magic that was passed through me by Ray Harryhausen, Batman, and Godzilla films as a child has been reworked and retooled for the modern era and passed to someone new, hopefully to fuel and inch humanity closer to a more idealized future.

Because there’s power in toys. Because the essence of play and creation is magic and dreams, and magic and dreams are the fuel that drives us to build a better world.

A Fun Sidenote

My birthday is in a few weeks, but my wife couldn’t wait to deliver one of my presents. A week or so ago, she reached out to Kevin Conroy on Cameo, the definitive voice of Batman for the last (nearly) 30 years. He’s the voice I grew up with when Batman: The Animated Series first aired in 1992, and he’s the voice I hear, to this day, when I read Batman comics.

At any rate, he sent me a birthday greeting and a sweet message. You can find it here: https://www.cameo.com/v/9dufjMshq