What a fantastic span of days. I really need to start journaling more in order to remember all of this.
Some Good News!
The first edition of Don’t Talk to Strangers sold out! Thanks to everyone who purchased a copy. The second book is coming out soon!
Some Bad News!
I lost one of the notebooks of journal entries. I don’t exactly know how–I’m fairly certain it fell out of my pocket while I was collecting stories. I’m a little torn over the whole thing. On the bright side, I already transcribed about 70% of the stories out of it. On the worse side, that means I lost about 40% of the entries on top of 100% of the beautiful character of each entry that came from the handwriting. I had a phone number and address inside of the notebook, so I’m hoping it will be returned. If you’re the one who happened to find it and make it to my site, please return it. It’d mean quite a lot.
Speaking of stories, I decided to take a break from story collecting in Ann Arbor to go visit my friend Amanda in Grand Rapids. The weekend started with 80s night, lots of dancing (including a bit on the stage), meet ups with new friends, fantastic walks, engaging talks, a delicious dinner at Gaia. We then decided to visit Eric Ottati. a friend whom we hadn’t seen in months. We got to check out his office at Hero Interactive. It was great to see the place where great games like Bubble Tanks 2 are made.
The whole weekend was great. swimming, beaches, sand castles, drinks with friends, good movies, etc. The highlight of the weekend was around 3AM on Saturday (well, Sunday, technically). I’m a little bruised and bloody from the encounter, but it was well worth it. After a nearly pitch black climb down a 150ft steeply wooded hill, we arrived on the shore of Lake Michigan. There were massive storm waves crashing into large black rocks lining the shore. We climbed over the back side of the rocks, over the top, and down the front before and steadying ourselves inside small crevices at the water front. We then gripped the rocks and let the waves crash into us—the splashes reaching over our heads with each crash. It might have been the most alive I’ve felt in quite some time. There was laughing, yelling (akin to Where the Wild Things Are), danger, and excitement. It was like a mosh pit with nature. Had it been a movie, it would have been a mash-up of Fight Club and Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth. Good moves, world.
I’m addicted to this whole being alive thing.