The Journey

October 2026

I owe my interest in writing to my high school drama teacher. He challenged us to write one-act plays, which the class would read and vote on for our end-of-year festival. I was fortunate enough to have mine selected, but the real thrill was hearing the words I'd imagined in my head coming out of actors' mouths. They'd spent weeks memorizing MY words! Then there was the audience, laughing and reacting to something I wrote. I was hooked. I wanted to be the next Christopher Durang.

My working-class parents also found a way to send me to theatre camp each summer, where I studied with Tony Award-winning playwright Mark Medoff. I later majored in Theatre Arts at New Mexico State and helped direct one of Medoff's new works during my senior year. We'd discuss what worked and what didn't during rehearsal. He'd go home and return the next day with freshly rewritten pages. Watching him work taught me that no matter how good the writing might be, it could always be better.

I did sign up for a summer playwriting class in college. At the time, I didn't have a car, so I rode my bike across the Chihuahuan Desert in the middle of summer to get to campus. On the first day, I arrived drenched in sweat and pulled out a bottle of water as the professor introduced herself. She looked right at me. "No drinks in class."

"It's just water," I explained. "I rode my bike here. It's like a hundred degrees outside!"

She insisted I put it away. That afternoon, I dropped the class. It wasn't required, and I figured I'd just take another acting class instead. Seemed like a perfectly reasonable decision at the time. Looking back, I've often wondered what I might have learned if I'd stayed. All over a bottle of water.

When I graduated, I discovered I actually needed to make some money to pay the rent. Sorry, theatre! I spent the next decade working in construction, maintenance, and the greenhouse industry. I did plenty of growing, but not much writing.

The ideas never stopped coming. I'd jot down scenes and characters in a notebook or email myself with the subject line "SCRIPT IDEA!" When I found time to write, I'd get through a scene I really liked, then stare at the blinking cursor wondering where to go next. This happened dozens of times. I had pieces of stories, but couldn't figure out how to turn them into a screenplay.

The Stories Had to Wait

Eighteen years ago, my wife became pregnant with twins. I'd never even held a baby and was slightly terrified. We ran the numbers and decided I'd stay home. Have you seen the cost of daycare?! Fortunately, my wife's career as a veterinarian made that possible. A couple of years later, we added a third child.

So, the perfect opportunity to write, right? Not exactly. I was outnumbered! Between diapers, grocery shopping, reading stories, school activities, and even some homeschooling, there wasn't much time left. When I managed to get all three children to nap, I usually needed one myself. But I wanted to make the most of those years. I kept collecting script ideas, knowing I'd get to them someday.

I did find one creative outlet that fit between naps, baby bottles, and diapers. Twitter. Back when we were limited to 140 characters, I started writing jokes. There was a wonderfully competitive community of comedians and writers, all trying to outdo each other every day. Plenty of the jokes were juvenile, and I'm not sure all of them have aged particularly well. But I was writing regularly, even if I was doing it a sentence at a time.

To my astonishment, I attracted thousands of followers. Sarah Silverman followed me and even retweeted one of my jokes. Rob Delaney and writers from Conan, Modern Family, The Daily Show, Family Guy, and more followed along. A few websites included me on their lists of top tweeters, including National Lampoon. That particular honor even came with a trophy and an awards ceremony in Los Angeles, hosted, if memory serves, by comedian Eddie Pepitone. I couldn't attend, despite actually being in Southern California at the time. Instead, I was at Disneyland, in the middle of a Halloween heat wave with temperatures over 100 degrees, surrounded by three sick, snot-nosed children. The Happiest Place on Earth. Allegedly.

Reader's Digest even published one of my jokes! I was officially huge with 60-year-old men sitting on the toilet and the waiting-room demographic. Can you believe they sent me a check for $100?! This was the big time.

I even got paid to write a series of short comedy sketches promoting a novelty gift that never made it into production. The concept was so ridiculous I'm not sure I could explain it without sounding like I'd made it up. But for a brief moment, someone was actually paying me to write comedy. That felt like a pretty big deal.

The attention also led to a few other unexpected opportunities. An SNL writer gave me the chance to "audition" to write for Weekend Update. I didn't make the cut. Maybe I wasn't their brand of humor, or maybe I simply wasn't ready. Either way, being asked was surreal. And with three kids in diapers in Albuquerque, moving to New York wasn't exactly realistic.

Someone at Adams Media also approached me about writing a book. I came up with a half-baked concept involving a supposedly "found" sketchbook from the 1990s, filled with handwritten jokes, drawings, fake Polaroids, and material adapted from my tweets. I'm still not entirely sure it made sense, but the guy I was working with seemed convinced it could work. I even started assembling pages. Unfortunately, he left the company before anything came of it, and my publishing career ended in a personnel change.

But the moment that probably meant the most came in 2011, when I received a DM from Alec Sulkin, arguably the funniest guy on Twitter.

"You've been tweeting some awesome stuff."

I nearly fell out of my chair. I told him my goal was to write for television or movies one day. He offered to read anything I'd written!

There was just one problem. I had nothing finished to send him.

I had notebooks full of characters, ideas for television shows, and scenes I knew belonged in movies. What I didn't have was a complete TV pilot or screenplay. I only really had time to make people laugh in 140 characters while spoon-feeding strained peas to resistant babies.

None of those opportunities turned into a writing career at the time, but the encouragement meant more than I could have imagined. Professional comedy writers whose work I admired were connecting with something I'd written. Maybe there really was something to this writing thing after all.

The Stories Took Shape

As the kids got older, I finally had more time. Two would be leaving for college in a few years, and I felt I had something to prove before the house started emptying out. I'd been saving these ideas for nearly thirty years. Was I ever going to write them? A ticking clock has always motivated the hell out of me.

I started studying story structure and finally began to understand how the scenes I'd imagined could fit into a complete story. How did I not know this before?! It seems so obvious now! Maybe I should have stayed in that playwriting class after all. Eventually, I finished my first feature, The Trencherman. It needed plenty of work, but I'd finished it! For once, I had a whole screenplay to revise instead of another scene I'd abandoned. As I worked on the next scripts, I spent more time doing some serious planning before I started writing. Finishing became easier, and ideas that had been sitting in my notebooks and emails finally became screenplays.

Once I had a story planned out, I had to get it out of my head. I rarely worked on more than one script at a time and could disappear into that world for hours. My family quickly got used to me staring at the screen from the time I woke up until long past midnight. Sometimes, when I was tired, it was almost like hearing the dialogue in a dream. It felt like magic. Lucid writing? Is that a thing? Fortunately, by then my children knew how to make meals. If only they'd get the groceries, too.

At the checkout, I'm still half inside my screenplay, having some completely ordinary conversation with the cashier. Then, on the drive home, I'll start replaying it. I'll change what I said, imagine how the cashier might have responded, then change that response, too. Sometimes, I'll run through the exchange over and over, taking it in increasingly absurd directions to amuse myself. I do this with conversations all the time, even when I'm not working on a script. Sometimes I'm overthinking something stupid I said. Other times, I don't even realize I'm doing it. I guess I've been doing a rewrite on reality my whole life. I can't be the only one?

Every script taught me something I could use to improve the older ones. I also started sharing drafts with screenwriters, theatre friends, and even my old drama teacher, who's still a close friend.

One of the people I still bounce ideas around with is John Salcido, a Los Angeles-based writer, director, and producer I met at theatre camp all those years ago. He's contributed to AURA, Terroir, and Oh, My Darlin', and we've also co-written a screenplay I hope to talk more about soon.

Speaking of Oh, My Darlin', one of my favorite moments came when my daughter finished reading it in tears. As a parent, making your child cry isn't exactly the goal. As a writer, I was thrilled. And she cried over more than one of my scripts! Success!

My daughter and colleagues were fans, but how was I going to get the scripts read beyond my own circle? By then, I'd written nearly twenty screenplays, ranging from dark comedies to dramas, thrillers, and science fiction. I kept coming back to flawed people making terrible decisions for reasons I could understand. People sometimes ask how I came up with so many ideas so quickly. I didn't! I'd been collecting them for nearly thirty years. I just finally figured out how to turn them into finished screenplays.

The Stories Went Looking for an Audience

At the time, I didn't even know screenwriting competitions existed. All I'd heard were stories about writers sending out hundreds of cold queries and never hearing back. Then I stumbled onto FilmFreeway and discovered contests like PAGE and Austin Film Festival. Here was an actual opportunity to get my scripts read by experienced readers and, if they did well enough, maybe even catch the attention of someone in the industry. The odds still seemed ridiculous, but at least I had a way to give it a shot. So I decided to make a grand experiment out of it and submit a wide range of scripts. Which ones would resonate? Who would read them? Would their experiences have anything in common with mine? I really didn't know. Some scripts went nowhere. Others advanced much further than I expected.

Then #FightForNoah won the Comedy Grand Prize at the Fade In Awards and the PAGE Silver Prize for Comedy. AURA became a PAGE Finalist. A Walking Shadow reached the Austin Film Festival Drama Feature Semifinals, and I also had ten Second Rounders at Austin. My Timothy Leary limited-series pilot, The High Priest, became a Finalist in the Outstanding Screenplays TV Pilot Competition. Altogether, my scripts earned around 50 awards and competition placements in 2026. Other people actually enjoyed my work! What a feeling.

There were plenty of rejections, too. I want to keep revising the scripts that didn't connect, and even the ones that did. For the first time in thirty years, I don't have a backlog of unwritten screenplays clawing to get out of my brain. I've finally written down nearly all those ideas, and frankly, it's a relief. New ones will come. For now, I'd like to keep improving the scripts I've written and figure out how to get one made.

I know how fortunate I am to write full-time. My wife's work made it possible for me to stay home with our children, and her support now gives me the chance to pursue this career. I'll never be able to thank her enough for either opportunity.

Theatre hasn't left me, either. I've adapted several scripts for the stage, hoping to bring some of film's momentum to theatre and some of theatre's imaginative magic to film. In 2026, A Walking Shadow was selected for The Road Theatre Company's Summer Playwrights Festival. Hearing professional actors speak words that had lived in my head for so long took me straight back to that high school One-Act Festival. After all these years, the thrill hasn't faded. I hope I get to experience it again.