Full Circle-where the blog name comes from

This is South Weddington Park in 2021, now right next to the Universal City bus/Red Line train station, built several years ago, and hidden behind a wall.  In 1991, I used to sit on the little hill on the left, next to my freestyle bike, and write whatever came into my mind.  This is the spot where, 30 years ago, I first decided to try to "become a real writer."  

My first "real" TV industry job, working as a production assistant on the 1991 Supercross and monster truck TV series, got me commuting from Huntington Beach up to Studio City, just over the hill from Hollywood.  What started as a day of logging footage of monster truck driver interviews, turned into a 3 or 4 month production job.  When that ended, I got a job as a video duplication guy in a small business in North Hollywood, and moved into a sketchy, ghetto apartment nearby, where I rented a bed by the week.  I rented a bed, $40 a week, not the whole room.  I worked second shift on that job, and began to wander the east end of the San Fernando Valley on my BMX bike during the day, since I didn't have a car.  

That was nearly six years after I published my first BMX freestyle zine in September 1985. I started San Jose Stylin' to meet other BMX freestyle riders in the San Francisco Bay Area, after moving from Boise to San Jose with my family.  I was a year out of high school, and working at Pizza Hut and riding my freestyle bike most of every day, hoping to be a pro rider some day.  Instead, 11 issues of my San Jose Stylin' zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, a month after my 20th birthday.  At age 20, without ever taking a college course, I was proofreading two magazines.

That led to editing a newsletter the next year, which led to video work, which led to working at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company.  That closed down in 1990, and I self-produced a freestyle video that year, The Ultimate Weekend, which lost me a bunch of money.  But I started doing some freelance video work.  A former Unreel co-worker called me one day, and got me a job working in the production office of the supercross and monster truck shows that year.  Four years of me working in the BMX industry, it "died," and I became a video duplicator guy, and TV crew guy. 

I never thought of myself as a writer while while publishing my zines, working at the magazine, and when I began working at the newsletter.  But I came to realize I liked writing at the newsletter, and was pretty good at it.  Then I started dating a singer in a local rock band, who wrote her own songs.  So I started trying to write song lyrics for her.  They sucked, but she got me started thinking of myself as an actual "writer."  

So it was nearly five years after my first paid writing job that I began to really want to become a "real writer."  I began to ride my bike to Weddington Park in the mornings, to escape my crazy apartment and roommates.  I sat in the shade of these small trees, and just started writing whatever came into my mind.  I wanted to write a "great novel," or screenplay, or something great.  But mostly I wrote crap, journal type stuff about my day to day life.  

But then, after a couple weeks of that, every once in a while, a cool idea would pop into my head, and I'd write it out for two or three pages.  So my real journey as an intentional prose writer began at Weddington Park, in 1991.  Somehow, my crazy life landed me back up in this area, though homeless, in 2019.  A couple months ago, I realized it had been 30 years, and a crazy journey in both life and writing, and I somehow came full circle, back to the Weddington Park, Studio City/North Hollywood area.  But now I understand much more about why I write, how my process works, and have a bunch of writing, if not paid writing, under my belt. 

I still have never published a "real" print book.  I did publish a 263 page ebook about BMX in early 2021, and sold a 50 copies.  But I've written and put out about 30 zines, 25+ blogs, over 2,400 blog posts, and landed well over 435,000 online page views since those days writing in the park in 1991.  I've learned a lot about writing, life, and my creative process in the last 30 years.  I've learned a lot more about why I write, as well. 

Now, that I've come full circle in 30 years, this blog is about my ideas and things I've learned in that last 30-35 years of writing, and life in general.  So that's where the name comes from.