I’ve felt like I’ve been in a creative dry spell for months. This world is in such a weird place of transition right now and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t affecting me. I’ve also been busy with extensive home renovations. But as I was writing this post the other day I realized none of this would have stopped the younger version of me. If anything, the frustration of it all would have sent me running straight into the arms of my healing flow-state of creation. It would have pushed me to work harder.
As I move through my middle years, for the first time in my life, I find myself settling into a place of comfort and it’s quite unsettling. Many of the things I find myself taking for granted now are things I only dreamed of decades ago. Yet there's still this nagging voice inside of me that I need to keep sharpening the skills, to keep learning, to continue creating. That previous post I wrote made me realize the extent to which this is true as well.
I’ve been quietly plotting my next career-pivot for the past few months in my head and now feels like the perfect time to share a little bit about it. Actually, the tracks to this brand new dream have been being assembled for the past five years without me being fully conscious of it.
"The comfort zone is always the most desirable place to be. But in settling for comfort, there is a price to pay and it comes in the death of ambition, of hope, of youth and the death of self." ~Simon Barnes
A little backstory—around 2019 the streaming series project I was working on and planning to sell to Netflix imploded. The team and I wrote what we felt were three really solid seasons but the funding dried up and the project quickly withered on the vine. Having invested more than two years of my life into this project and a whole lot of creative energy I was devastated—left with a massive blow to my confidence and no any other tangible prospects. I decided at that point to take a break and go traveling to help gather my thoughts, heal, and regroup.
For the rest of that year my wife and I traipsed through foreign countries, immersed ourselves in different cultures, and schlepped through countless airports. We had the time of our lives. Ideas for a path forward began to gel—a YouTube travel channel! The travel-writing genre always called out to me, beginning with Rick Steves in the 1990s and culminating with Anothony Bourdain’s shows.
I signed up for a masterclass in filmmaking taught by the YouTuber Casey Neistat and eventually produced two short-films as part of that class curriculum. I enjoyed the hell out of that class. I discovered that this kind of storytelling lit a fire inside of me and just as I was preparing to buy all the gear I needed to start building the channel the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The pandemic and its many lingering after-effects brought that particular dream to a screeching halt. Again, I felt like the rug was pulled from underneath me.
So I did the only thing I could—I kept writing.
From 2021-to-2025 I continued blogging here on Hive, turning some of the material into self-published books. As much as I hated to admit it, I discovered in short order, people were no longer buying the kind of books I was writing (meditation, mindfulness, poetry). Social media algorithms had shortened attention spans and changed consumer tastes.
Sales of those books were nowhere near what my first few titles achieved but I kept telling myself, “Maybe the next one will do better”. As the saying goes, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Yeah, that was me. In so many ways I felt, paralyzed, trapped in a prison cell of my own creation. Aside from short fiction and a science fiction novel these genres are all I really knew.
Then one evening, while on a solitary walk under the stars, an idea hit me. I should lean into my strength. The genre that I’ve always enjoyed the most and have gone back to, again and again—poetry. Over the past thirty years I’ve written over five hundred poems. What if I were to repackage them? I could read the poems, pair them with an accompanying video and upload them to YouTube! The idea just seemed like a good fit and the barriers to achieve this kind of content didn’t seem as high as creating a travel channel. Most of all, the idea relit that fire inside of me. All I really needed was a decent microphone, AI software to create videos based on the poems, and editing software to combine the two.
So here we are, many weeks later. The equipment has been purchased, the first few poems have been chosen, and audio recording begins in the next few weeks. This project will probably take the better part of the next few years and I see it as part of my legacy. I really want to throw all I have into it and make this project something special. I have no idea when I’ll begin uploading but it will likely be sometime early next year. I want to have at least a dozen produced before I start sending them out into the world. The best thing about this particular adventure is I can do it from anywhere.
A quick question for you all. What AI software would you recommend for creating videos over a minute in length to pair with the audio file of the poem?
Ideally, the plan is to use the poem itself as the prompt to create the video. Many of the AI platforms I’ve found only create video clips of a few seconds in length. I could work with this but it would take much longer since manual video editing is so time consuming. This is the final piece to the puzzle.
In the meantime I’ll be recording audio files like a madman. As much as we chase it and plot to achieve it—comfort is, indeed, our greatest adversary. I plan on fighting it off for as long as humanly possible.
All for now. Thanks so much for reading.
