![]() We were stuck for over a year, unable to find an out. Sitting up in the attic with my laptop later, sneezing from hayfever, I kept looking for jobs. I’ll never forget looking up and seeing 1600 lbs of white-eyed cow dropping down on me and an ex-Navy trucker. That mama was so mad we’d separated her from her calf that she pounded up over the trailer door, and broke through the boards. Horses and a herd of cows kept the grandad busy, and I helped him roll around huge bales of hay, or deliver orders to local counties.Īt one point we even tried shipping a cow off. We borrowed a dinged-up van, and holed up with her grandparents in a Tennessee farm house. ![]() And my wife was bitten by a dinky tick, and collapsed with Lyme disease. I had to apply for everything afresh.Īnd then the job offer was withdrawn. Finding my documentation again was a drawn-out nightmare. On top of that, I was raised in Australia. See, I was born in New Zealand, and then naturalized as a US citizen. In less than a year, I returned to the USA, intending to marry Maria, a fantastic girl I’d met online, and head right back to Sydney to keep working. It was my first exposure to branding individual things, regularly. Each tour had its own identity, its own service, its own tone and promise. This was an opportunity to take everything I’d taught myself in business so far, particularly my budding graphic design skills, and help coordinate national tours and client accounts. I tried going to college, and lasted an amazing year before I had to drop out and come back to work. It was so intense, I dropped out of high school, and completely failed the math section in my SAT. We tackled it all together for five years. He needed help purging email lists, managing client databases, printing direct mail campaigns, making website updates, creating graphic designs, and editing media for DVDs and CDs. My dad ran a motivational speaking business out of our basement. Right around then, I started working with the family business, and all this imaginative creativity was moored into a daily grind. All this was before I had a computer, or the internet. Collating notes on napkins and sheets of paper, binge reading novels like there was no tomorrow. ![]() I was brainstorming new novels each month. I definitely wanted to be a novelist for the rest of my life. Those two years were the last rivets in the starship of my imagination, the final building blocks that cemented my castle in the air. ![]() In my last years of high school, I enrolled in the Writers Institute for Children’s Literature, and took their course for writing for children and teens. She turned me from an uncritical reader into someone who could identify tropes, themes, character critique and story arcs. Two years of intense ‘study’, and she changed my attitude. One of my teachers was a hard-nosed, imaginative, and exacting Dominican nun who shoved my nose deep into classical literature and poetry. ![]() I charged into the sequel, a second novel about the same length.ĭuring that time, I was writing science fiction stories about heroes pitted against planets, dinosaurs vs lightsabers, and star-flung war escapees. Three years later, I was studying in a boarding school in France. I stored it away until I could type it up. It was discovery-written I knew where I wanted to end up, and every day for about 3 months, chipped away at a few pages with a ballpoint pen. I knew I wanted something like Narnia, and it was a fantastical romp for two young children through a world of magic and talking animals. You've had nothing, been burnt out, and forced to make something work when you have no idea how to deliver. I'm discovering a newfound passion in taking the techniques of fiction writing and applying them to branding and business content marketing.Īnd I want to find a way for all small businesses like you to succeed too. I lost my job, my wife lost her health, and we lost somewhere to go. I met an amazing woman online, and came home to the USA to marry her. It seemed like the Yellow Brick Road had opened up before me. I quit college to keep working, and even moved to Australia. I started as a fiction writer, and promised that I'd grow old writing novels, and being awesome forever.īut in high school, I was pushed (willingly-ish) into the work force. But here's how I got to where I am today, and where I'm going from here on out. ![]()
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