Category: Personal

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I’m Back from New Mexico

I went on a small vacation to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico to visit Christian Beranek, co-creator of Validation.

Newsletter subscribers got some cool stories about what we did during the vacation. So for you, dear reader, I’m going to share some of the sketches I made during the trip.

new mexico trip sketches

We saw the lava rock petroglyphs on the outskirts of Albuquerque, so I made lots of sketches of those.

new mexico petroglyphs sketches

Then, on our way to some restaurants in Santa Fe, we stopped through Madrid and Cerillos.

new mexico madrid sketches

And yes, that is a zebra on a roof with a guitar. Here’s a picture me drawing the thing in real life if you don’t believe me.

madrid new mexico photography by christian beranek
Photography by Christian Beranek

Christian took lots of pictures while we drove around, which turned out really nicely.

madrid new mexico dinosaur sign
Photography by Christian Beranek

By the end of the trip, I felt rested and rejuvenated! It was great to get out of Ohio and West Virginia for a change and see the enormous, expansive desert that I missed so much.

I may have moved out of Arizona two years ago, but the deserts will always make me feel more at ease.

…I’m already planning a return trip next year.

Thank you for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

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The Ball Will Return: Thoughts on Creative Work

"the original" painting

There was a post I wrote on this blog years ago. It’s so old I had written it back when this blog was hosted on Blogger (jeez, remember that?). It was about the concept Neil Gaiman mentioned in a commencement speech in 2012: the concept of throwing your work out to the world like messages in a bottle, and hoping that the bottles wash back to you.

At the time I wrote my blog post, I didn’t mention it, but I had a kind of fatalistic view of the bottles – I thought that when I threw bottles out into the sea, they would never come back. I would post work, work, and more work, and get no return out of it.

It wasn’t until I came across Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert that I revisited this idea of throwing bottles/work out to the world. Continue reading “The Ball Will Return: Thoughts on Creative Work”