Creative Writing

In addition to developing new characters, I've written manuscripts and provided art direction for eight Thomas & Friends™ storybooks. Here's a sample of that work.

When I was feeling creatively sluggish, I started posting daily poems and musings on Instagram. I was surprised to find a thriving, enthusiastic community of writers. The daily postings were a reminder that writing, like anything worth doing, takes discipline and commitment.

I dabble in microfiction ... because why not?

Reflections of a Time Traveler

I guess I’m looking for something inspirational… maybe the beginning.

Well, not the beginning in a sense of time and space, but the beginning in terms of simplicity.

Some things are the same.  Sleeping, you look exactly as I remember.  You teeter on the edge of wakefulness to speak the same slumber-laden gibberish that you did years ago.  The words are different, but the tone is the same, sprinkled with that tired exasperation and endearing confusion.  Your eyelids remain lazily shut—darkened theater curtains obstructing intense treasures—and your head doesn’t move as you spit quiet nonsense into the cold room, an unknowing experimentation of language pulsing with a meaning that’s beautiful and elusive.

You’re exhausted from picking through years of my scattered thoughts and harping on my desire to forget, to have new associations for different continents.  Minutes ago, your prying eyes were hungry, but now you’re worn out from playfully suggesting that it should all be about longing, tired from trying to rewrite my story in terms of you.

Right now, you’re dreaming about being the context.

I can feel the room getting smaller, shrinking to nothing more than two bodies on a mattress.  The walls crumble without a sound and the floor silently dissipates like thin fog.  We’re floating through a wormhole, careening through a past that we’ve been trying to recreate.  We’re flirting with smooth mosaics and innovative architecture in Barcelona.  We’re sweating in London subways, hoping to see Guy Fawkes fireworks.  We’re chasing away each other’s phobias, ascending to the apex of Christianity.  And we’re falling apart in the moonlit gardens of New Jersey.

Outside, the sky explodes with dawn’s fluorescent watercolors.  It reminds me of sitting in your backyard, seeing the lights and desperation of Atlantic City as a volatile sunrise.  It’s amazing how only months later, instability carried me towards alarm clocks splattered with brain fragments, where I watched my mind melt seamlessly into time, controlling it with electric impulses, empowered by just the right cocktail of drugs.  The neon numbers absorbed my memories like sponges while my skull’s indentation flowered with crimson petals.

I guess you can never really go back.  We’re made for momentum, gazes plastered on what’s in front of us.

That's why we don’t have eyes in the back of our heads.