Month: August 2011

“That’s how bad I want to be here. And if it means I have to suffer through the might-have-beens, or do other entertainment industry-related things until something direct in animation opens up again, I’m willing to do it.” – Shannon Muir, Summer 2002

The above quote comes from the tagline of the second of my writeups from when I was between jobs in the industry and struggling with a sense of future direction (see https://shannonmuir.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/how-bad-do-i-want-to-be-here/ and https://shannonmuir.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/how-bad-do-i-want-to-be-here-the-sequel/, both originally written for another site and transplanted here with the original written by dates noted at the bottom of each post).   Now in 2011, I find myself back in the same boat after over 3.5 years of working consistently for a single, major entertainment industry company – something that is virtually unheard of anymore not just in entertainment, but in the job market.  It’s brought a different perspective I haven’t had for some time, while also making me realize I seem to be slightly rusty on a few things.

In those earlier years when I worked in television not knowing if we’d make it from season to season, I now realize I got used to more living in an “every day’s the last” mentality.  That never stopped me from doing my best, I just realized it could all end tomorrow every day I woke up. 

The big difference in my most recent job, in a nutshell, is that I forgot.  I got comfortable. I got complacent.  Again, this didn’t affect the quality or output of the job I did.  The difference immediately became apparent when this last job ended, and my brain could not get my head around what I should do for a couple of days.  I’d also come, for a variety of reasons, to see my last workplace more like a family even though some of my coworkers voluntarily left for other jobs over the years.  None of that is a statement on the company I worked for or decisions they made in why myself and others got laid off.  It’s a statement about my own viewpoint of a situation and the lessons to be learned from it.  No matter how much I like the people I work with, I can’t let myself get too attached; though that doesn’t mean don’t like them, I just have to show some restraint on that front.  I need to remember what worked in the past to survive for 15 years.  There’s more surviving to be done.

Back to the title of the piece, which goes back to the question of being here, being the Los Angeles entertainment scene.  My more recent training definitely lends itself to moving to San Francisco or Seattle or places like that.  Maybe that is, ultimately, where I need to go next.  However, making it 15 years in Los Angeles when many people throw in the towel for less is impressive.  I’ve met a lot of great people outside of work, and kept contact with some from various workplaces I’ve had, that I see in person now and then at professional gatherings that I would miss.   Not to mention, there’s a very special person in my life who actually has a job and I’d be asking him to uproot himself for my own selfishness.  To move somewhere else would mean starting near completely or completely over, depending on if anyone else I knew moved to the same area or would be at the company where I’d go.  As illustrated by my above point with my last job, I am a person of emotional investment, and I’ve emotionally invested a lot of my life in the Los Angeles area.  Moving somewhere else at the moment doesn’t seem to have the right amount of ROI (return on investment for those who don’t know the term) but that can always change.

I have no regrets about moving from my town of 10,000 people and 3 stoplights to Los Angeles in June of 1996.  The journey’s been amazing even with all its ups and downs.  I’m not interested it bringing it to an end just yet.  For any personal ambition, you have to look at your own ROI and see where the risks are worth taking, or if you’re willing to live with the potential regret of having never tried at all.

It dawned on me that while I have an “About” tab for those willing to dig for information, that many people may just browse through this blog without really taking much of a look at it.  While it paints a great picture of my larger mission and goals, it may not give the best picture of who the person behind all of this is.  So this post is to introduce (or re-introduce) you to me and what I’m about.

I’ve been writing professionally in one form or another since 2000 when I first got paid for a monthly column geared for writers and other non-artists (people who can’t draw) in the animation industry that ran at Suite101.com.  Later I would move on and do similar work for Digital Media FX at the digitalmediafx.com website.  In both of those cases, I held a regular day job while doing the columns.  Later finding myself unemployed, I released a variety of one off articles and flash fiction while doing temp work. During graduate school, the opportunity came my way to be one of two “Western” writers for an animated series produced in Japan.  After graduate school and transitioning into a temp-to-perm job, my buildup of credits writing about animation as well as writing for animation earned me the opportunity to write not one, but two, textbooks about the business I’d come to love.  This brings us to 2011, with me starting to go into the venture of independent publishing and as of this posting between jobs again.  That’s not even counting the last ten years I’ve spent as co-author of the webcomic FLYING GLORY AND THE HOUNDS OF GLORY at http://www.flying-glory.com as a unpaid investment with hopes to turn the property into more.

Except in a way, I’ve always had a job.  Writer.  Some points it has been noticed more than others, but it’s always been there, definitely in the lst decade. 

It goes back farther than 2000 though.  I first started getting interested in writing poetry and short stories in late elementary school, mainly thanks to a great teacher who insisted we try to use all twenty spelling words in a story every week and read the best ones to the class.  When the teacher often read my stories, especially when I was not well liked and don’t have a lot of friends, I got a clue that perhaps there might be something more to this.  Somehow not much later I got interested in animation, though I couldn’t draw, and got it in my head you didn’t need to be able to draw to write animation (to this day I don’t know how I knew that).  Though persistence and perserverance,  I made contact with my first professional writer 25 years ago, and started educating myself to take writing – writing in Hollywood in particular – seriously.  I also kept working on the more “traditional” poetry and stories that got me started.  15 years ago I moved to Los Angeles, where I’ve seen the various methods for storytelling grow and evolve and tried to learn as best I can to adapt to new formats and times.  Some things like game cutscenes and dialogue writing (which is vastly different from level design) I have yet to try my hand at and would love to.

I’ve been around and learned a lot.  It’s my hope to share that knowledge, along with various reflections on things I have about the writing and animation life, as part of this blog.  Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you stick around.