I’m now on the race to the end of the first draft of Cold Storage. At this point, it’s no longer about finding out what I’m going to write, but simply getting the words down on paper. There’s a wonderful sense of momentum at this point of the writing process.

When I need a mental break, I’ve been transferring old home movies from DVD or Hi-8/DV to USB storage drives.

About 20 years ago I used to make microcinema video films.

There was a push in the late ’90s to use this digital technology to make movies without degradation, like with analog (tape-to-tape), and the advent of the internet, and the ability to either show or sell your work anywhere in the world. Combined, there was an exciting focus on filmmakers taking advantage of this new digital technology to make short movies and feature films.

I actually interviewed the people on the forefront of that artistic initiative and had a book published of the interviews.

When I had moved from television to corporate America, I used this new technology to express my creativity to make short movies.

The editing systems back then were simple and the digital codecs, which means the way they compressed and stored video, were not nearly as crisp as they are today.

So, I decided to, in my free time in between writing sprints, to recapture from the original footage some of these short films and re-edit them so that my archival copy will be the best quality it could be.

Since I was 9 years old I wanted to make movies. And it was during this digital phase where I got to make a lot of movies, not for public consumption, but as an artistic expression. It was a very satisfying part of my life.

So I want to make sure that phase of my life, before I began writing novels, can be revisited and the highest quality way possible.