From Thought to Reality

When it comes to creative work, coming up with ideas has rarely been my problem. I’m someone who, for better or worse, finds dreaming about the possibilities easier than breathing. But in the process of bringing those wonderful, amazing, seemingly perfect dreams into reality, that’s where I often run into issues. Issues that have a tendency to kill the whole damn thing before it has any chance to get going.

A classic example of this for me took place back in high school. A few friends and I had been dabbling with filmmaking, creating little shorts for fun and for our friends, but I remember one day, I showed up with an idea. We were going to be rich, I told them. All we needed to do was create some serialized short videos, post them for free online to get people hooked, and then monetize them with merchandise.

Now, for context, this was maybe 2006. YouTube had only been founded a year earlier, so this business model wasn’t as much a thing as it has become in the intervening years. Some people were doing it, but as far as I recall, it was mostly self-hosted stuff like Red vs Blue or Ask a Ninja.

For some reason, my friends went along with my crazy idea, and we began work on a multi-season, epic fantasy web series about clashing cultures, war, and lost loves, all wrapped up in the pirates and ninjas theme that was popular on the internet at the time. We had scripts for the full first season, and we even shot most of one episode. But somewhere in the mix of wild ambition, undeveloped skills, no budget, and the general “high schoolness” of it all, the project fell apart.

I never published any of it, and we did not, as I had so passionately predicted, become rich.

This should give you an idea of the sort of thing that I’ve long struggled with. I’ll get some big, crazy idea and try to execute on it. But things get hard or the reality is nowhere near the perfection I imagined, or I just get plain old bored and stuck. Soon enough, I’ll get pulled away by some new shiny idea, usually one that hasn’t yet been tainted by failed efforts to manifest it into the world, and the process repeats itself.

But with a lot of introspection and repetition, and a willingness to not run from discomfort, I’ve ever-so-slowly been able to rescue some of my plans I’d once resigned to being unsalvageable. Even if only on a small scale.

This is the story of one of those recent successes.

In fall 2023, when I was prepping for the release of my short story “Could’ve Been Claus,” I had much to do in a fairly brief window. But as my self-imposed, pre-Christmas deadline grew closer, I had to accept it was impossible to finish everything I wanted to in the time allotted. I would need to make cuts if I hoped to release by the deadline, which couldn’t really be moved because who reads Christmas stories in January?

Looking over the extravagant plans I’d made for myself, there were a few things that I found pretty easy to cut (more on those at a later date). The value they would add at the moment was not worth the time investment when time was at a premium. But other were harder to let go of.

Specifically, I felt bummed to launch the book without an author photo. Those little pictures on the back of the book or on the dust cover or on websites and social media seem like such an important part of author branding. Yet I didn’t have a photo of myself that met what I deemed necessary for a “good” option, and I didn’t want to use a “bad” photo as a placeholder, only to swap it out a few weeks later. So as disappointing as it was, I chose to go without it.

But I did successfully hit my deadline, and I released my little short story to the world! A few people even bought it, which is a thought that never ceases to give me joy.

Once the launch was behind me, I started looking ahead at what I wanted to accomplish next, and I began dreaming up ideas for what my author photo might look like. It was a particularly foggy winter, and on my daily walks, I would imagine a photo of myself looking all contemplative in a foggy, misty forest. This worked well with the choice I’d made to more intentionally accept some of the darker, moodier aspects of my writing. Brand synergy, and all that.

I mentioned this idea to a photographer friend of mine, and to my surprise, she offered to take the photo for me free of charge. (shout out to Nhaomi Art Photography!) I just had to wait a few weeks for our schedules to align.

While I waited, I researched author photo dos and don’ts, drafted up variations of what it could look like, and explored ideas for a location that we might shoot at. And each thing I did built up my expectations and excitement for this project. But when the time finally arrived to get to work, that unbridled anticipation ran smack into the unfeeling complexities of reality.

To make a long story short, fog is a bitch to wrangle. It didn’t take long for me to get fed up not being able to sleep because I didn’t want to miss the fog, only for there to be no fog or not enough fog in the morning. Or there was fog that we thought might burn off, so we waited, only for it to get thicker with not enough time to get out and shooting before dark.

Good golly did I not have the patience for that.

So one morning, after staring at the fog for hours and trying to figure out with my friend if it was enough or would last, I decided, “Fuck it. Let’s just go, and hope for the best. Worse case scenario, I have photos I could use, even if they’re not perfectly what I want, and we can try again if it gets foggy in the future.”

I’m so glad I was open to this less-than-desirable possibility before heading out, because by the time we set up at a shooting location, the fog had long since dissipated. I could definitely tell I was disappointed, but the excitement of actually doing the photo shoot propelled me through. I also had a new, more pressing issue to worry about: I didn’t know jack shit about modeling.

It wasn’t until the drive home a few hours later that my feelings about the lack of fog popped up again. Sure, we’d gotten some nice shots in some interesting locations. In a number of them, I didn’t even look stiff or awkward! So I definitely was going to get a usable author photo out of the day’s work. But none of the photos had the fog I’d been dreaming about for a month.

Over and over, I rationalized to myself that it was okay, repeating the logic I’d used to motivate myself that morning: “If I really want to, I can still try to find a foggy day, and we can do this again.” But I knew that was never going to happen.

With my non-existent knowledge of meteorology, trying to predict foggy days relied too much on luck, and I couldn’t keep running myself ragged, anxiously watching my weather app all day or looking out the window at 3 am to see if there was fog. Especially for what could, at best, really only amount to a slightly better photo than one I now had.

And none of that even accounted for the fact that I wasn’t the only person involved in this project, and that my friend was offering to do this as a gift to me.

But it still wasn’t the photo I’d planned…

A few weeks passed before we could revisit the photos in earnest, a delay I greatly appreciated. It gave me time to sit with my disappointment and allow it to subside a bit, so those feelings weren’t clouding my creative judgment as much. But the pause also gave me time to grow familiar with what had actually come out of the session. The real, tangible pictures we had made.

Pictures I could see with my eyes and could show others.

Pictures I could print out and touch.

Pictures which, with some post-production work, could become my author photo.

And as I grew more acquainted with them, I also felt a familiar sense of excitement returning.

Since the pictures weren’t what we’d originally planned for, it took a bit of trial and error to choose a photo and find a look that married the original concepts I had for the project with the reality of what we actually captured on the day. But I’m pretty proud of what we ended up with.

It may not be a perfect representation of my initial imaginings, but it absolutely satisfies the bigger picture goals I had for this project in a way I never expected.

And I don’t think I can possibly emphasize this enough, but this photo exists. In the real world. This isn’t just some fantasy living unrealized in the back of my mind. I’m putting this out there for the world (or at least my little corner of the internet) to see.

And that’s huge for me.

I’ve spent so much of my life frustrated and terrified and disappointed whenever I try to bring my dreams into reality, to the point where my creative output basically dried up for a very, very long time. But I’ve kept chipping away at what I perceive to be the underlying issues, and over years of work, things have slowly changed. Small wins, like completing this photo, have grown more frequent, and are proof for me that what I’ve been doing has worked, even if things are still progressing more slowly than I desire.

I know I’ve said similar things already, and I imagine I’ll say similar things again, but in a way that I’m still very unfamiliar with, I’m truly excited to see what the future holds.