Its January eighth, 2019. If my math is right, I’ve been living in Los Angeles four years and four months.

There’s a lot of different ways to think about that time. One way is to stack it against the time spent all the other places. Four years and three months is approximately three months longer than I spent at a small liberal arts college in Maryland studying ancient philosophy and English literature, Euclidean geometry and French poetry and a whole host of other things, some of which I only ever pretended to have any understanding of. Its a three years and several months longer than I spent in Philadelphia, my first year after College working the night-shift at a gas station/deli (or a Wawa, if you know what that is). Its three years longer than I spent in the San Francisco Bay area living near my brother and working as a bank teller. Its more time than I spent in Georgia, where I attended most of High School, but less time than I spent in Indiana or Oklahoma, which accounts for the rest of it. Its a considerable portion of my life’s geographic investment, living in LA.

Here’s another way: When I moved to LA, I was just shy of my twenty-fifth birthday, and now I am twenty-nine going on thirty. I’m not yet old, but I will never be a young man in the industry I have set out to make my home. If I had sold my first screenplay at twenty-six, or been staffed to a popular television show as late as last year, people might have said I was a prodigy, and attributed my success to an inherent genius. I feel with some certainty that that window has closed. Going forward, any success I enjoy will be attributed to hard work and to stubborn, perhaps perverse tenacity.

The way I think about it most often though is in terms of time spent writing. I can’t honestly say I spend the majority of each day working on a script, or even that I write every day. But there has never been a period longer than a week or two when I have not been writing something since I moved to LA. I’ve finished more than one feature-length script a year. More than two. A little more than three, I think. There isn’t room here to talk about how I feel about all that writing, or the course of my own development as a writer. But the simple correlation of time and output is undeniable. Life goes on, and I write the bones of movies, and occasionally TV shows. The seed I transplanted here has taken root and grown into something I don’t entirely understand. Hence the blog. But more about that later.