Write and produce a play.

“I had been a professional actor for about ten years; got my first gig at 16. Went to music school and went back to acting after. One of the theater companies I worked with asked me to write a song for a kid's show I was in. The producer liked the song enough to ask me to write an 8 minute curtain warmer for a night of one acts. Fast forward to a month before the show and one of the writers pulls out of the production and i was asked to expand my piece to 45 min. It wasn't good from any kind of dramatic standpoint. And that's not false modesty, it simply was not a premise that could sustain 45 minutes and it was slaughtered in reviews. I didn't write anything else for almost 10 years until I moved to Portland, OR and started working in the incredibly supportive professional theater and comedy community there that I started writing again. I ended up writing a musical based on the work of William Blake that premiered as part of the Fertile Ground Festival. We were called one of nine shows not to miss that year and I never looked back. Its hard and I've learned a lot but its far more rewarding to me when I finish that first complete draft than when the curtain finally falls.”

“My play (especially the last 15 pages or so) are incredibly emotional and every time I reworked an emotional scene, I’d say “I feel like a husk of a person because that took so much out of me”. Like I felt like I was breaking my heart on a regular basis and it was so emotionally draining (though also rewarding when I finally got a scene to really hit correctly). So maybe my feeling of accomplishment is mixed with a feeling of relief to not have to dive back into that emotional war-zone again for a very long time. Also, the feeling of knowing just how much of my blood, sweat, and tears I put into this show - I think the harder we work on something, the more proud of it we allow ourselves to be.”