I’ve been making up stories for as long as I can remember.

In sixth grade, I was just beginning to realize how much I loved writing. I had recently seen Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and decided, naturally, that what the world needed was a sequel screenplay written by an eleven-year-old.

Not long after that, my teacher gave us a creative-writing prompt about a boy skipping a stone across the water. We were supposed to finish the story.

So I wrote about a stone that reached a certain point… and started skipping back.

I was enormously proud of that idea.

My teacher was not.

I hadn’t been exposed to much of the strange, surreal, or unusual yet, so to me, that little returning stone felt like discovering an entire hidden door in my imagination. The reaction I got closed that door for a while. I stopped trusting that kind of creativity as much as I had before.

Years later, I found it again.

In college, an Eastern Philosophy assignment asked me to develop a thesis. I wrote about an idea that had been circling in my head: that science, religion, and philosophy might all be different tools human beings use to tell the same story about the universe.

My professor hated that one too.

I still loved it.

And unlike the skipping stone, this idea never really left me. It became one of the foundations of the way I think about stories: that mythology, physics, fear, faith, love, history, and the impossible don’t always have to live in separate boxes.

In 2015, I finally started writing creatively again.

An online friend held writing contests, and I entered one. My first story was… fine. I thought it was pretty good. My friend was supportive. The judges were considerably less impressed.

I did not come remotely close to winning.

So naturally, I became determined to win the next one.

I started working on a graphic-novel idea and wanted it to hurt a little. I began experimenting with color as emotional language, inspired in part by the way filmmakers use visual motifs to communicate things before the audience consciously understands them.

Then something unexpected happened.

For years after leaving the Marines, I carried a constant fear that something terrible might happen to my child. That fear often found its way into nightmares. While I was writing this new story, I started pouring those anxieties into fictional people instead.

And the nightmares began to fade.

The contest stopped mattering.

The story kept growing.

That story became Dimensions.

It began with a Marine injured under strange circumstances who falls in love with the surgeon who saves his life. They marry. They have a child. Tragedy strikes. Then reality itself begins behaving incorrectly: glitches in time, impossible events, and hints of a hidden conflict that almost nobody knows is taking place.

I never submitted it.

I just kept building.

I couldn’t draw well enough to make the graphic novel myself. I found an artist who liked the project, but life never gave us enough time to finish it together. I considered turning it into a novel, but I had never written one and wasn’t convinced I knew how.

So while Dimensions waited, my imagination did what it always seems to do.

It opened more doors.

Origins grew from my fascination with time, humanity, belief, and the possibility of traveling backward far enough to discover where we actually came from.

Manifest Destiny became a science-fiction horror story about an eccentric billionaire building an underground society designed to prepare humanity for Mars.

Lunacy followed settlers trying to establish life on the Moon, and eventually gave birth to a smaller story of its own, To the Moon and Back.

Then my stories began changing again.

I wanted to make worlds for my children.

The Little Astronaut began as a story for my youngest son: an adventure that teaches real science while reminding children that being big or small doesn’t determine their worth. In space, everyone gets to be extraordinary.

The Neighborhood Squad came from imagining a group of children from different backgrounds whose dreams don’t always fit the expectations society places on them. Together they protect their neighborhood, solve mysteries, and discover what they are capable of becoming.

Another story follows my stepdaughter after she is pulled into her tablet and thrown through a series of multiverse adventures, with the art style itself changing from world to world.

For my wife, I created The Shape of Empathy and The Song Beneath the Heart Tree.

And somewhere along the way came other strange little doors I’m still excited to open: Silhouette and Where the Road Ends.

There are more.

There always seem to be more.

That is what ImDoingMy.best is really about.

It isn’t one genre. It isn’t one universe. It isn’t even one way of telling a story.

Some of these worlds are science fiction. Some are horror. Some are mysteries. Some are for children. Some are about love, grief, fear, family, time, consciousness, or the universe itself. Some may become novels. Some may become graphic novels. Some may live as short stories. And increasingly, some will be told visually through generative filmmaking and cinematic storytelling.

For years, one of the things that kept these stories trapped in my head was medium. I could imagine the panel but couldn’t draw it. I could see the scene but couldn’t film it. I could hear the character but didn’t have an actor.

That barrier is beginning to disappear.

AI-assisted visual storytelling gives me a way to finally show people some of the things I have only been able to see in my imagination. Not to replace the writing, but to open another door into it.

A strange sky.

A moon settlement going quiet.

A person standing somewhere they should never have been able to reach.

A moment in history that never happened.

A child discovering that the universe is much bigger—and kinder—than they thought.

I don’t know exactly what every one of these stories will become.

That’s part of the fun.

I’m still writing them.

Still building them.

Still figuring out how to tell them.

I’m doing my best.