A Short Story Published and a new Hopstory!

I would like to invite everyone to check out my newly published short story "Customer Support" over on Silver Blade Magazine.

It's the first story I've ever gotten paid for so I'm pretty stoked.

I hope you like it!

Also, we just released our newest Hopstory! Hopstories is a web series a friend and I are putting out telling the stories of small craft breweries here in the Pacific Northwest.

Check out my write up HERE.

And watch the video below. I hope you like it!


Hopstories #3: Pfriem Family Brewers from Eric Buist on Vimeo.

The 3 minute animated short that made me cry.

I'm not much of a crier.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of these overly macho guys that never expresses their feelings. I'm just not often moved to tears.

This 2 min 48 sec animated short "Spacebound" had me sobbing. I'm talking about sitting in my office with tears running down my face. To be able to elicit that kind of emotion from your audience with such a short story, and one without dialog no less, is truly amazing.

Please watch it.

Spacebound from Spacebound on Vimeo.

The message, as I see it, is that the end is coming for all of us. We can either sit there watching the clock or we can get out into the universe and enjoy ourselves. There is no better "personification" of this message than a dog. They don't care about the future, they just want to live in the moment.

Truly a beautiful story.

Hopstories #2

We've posted the second in our web series telling the story of small craft breweries here in Oregon.

Please check out Hopstory #2!



I also did a writeup for the story that you can check out on our website.

Like it? Then Like Us on Facebook! 

Hopstories #1

As I mentioned recently, a buddy of mine, Eric Buist, and I are touring breweries here in the PNW to tell the story of how they got started. We call this little project "Hopstories".

Our very first Hopstory featuring Sky High Brewing and Pub in Corvallis, OR went live yesterday.



I conducted the interviews for the video and Eric did all of the fancy camera work. Some friends were kind enough to come drink some beer for the pub shots (generous of them) and Mr. and Mrs. Something composed a song for us.

If you go to the site, you'll also see an article I wrote for the Hopstory.

We're working hard on this and I hope you like it. Please, like us on Facebook and share us with your friends. Yeah beer!

Alive and Kicking!

Hello fellow bloggers, I'm just here to say that reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I am here, I'm still writing, just not fiction. Grad school has swallowed me whole for the moment. I'm knee deep in thesis writing/revising and I just don't have time for hardly any writing for fun.

BUT, every once in a while I squeeze in a little. Here are a couple things I've managed:

1. Hopstories



A buddy of mine and I are going around to a select number of Pacific Northwest microbreweries to conduct interviews and footage for a web-series we're producing called Hopstories. Basically, we're trying to tell the story of the breweries that make the craft beer we love so much. It's a lot of fun and I'm learning a lot about visual media (which I have no experience with). We're planning to release our first video this week so keep an eye out on our Facebook page (please "Like" us and share with your friends if you feel inclined) and check out our website.

2. Cartoons

I've also been doing a little drawing. After writing for academia all day it's nice to be creative in a little different way. I'm still a science geek so the cartoons I've been drawing are pretty science-geeky but my science-geeky friends seem to like them. I promise I'll post my first comic soon (maybe latter today), I just need to scan it in.

I hope everyone is rocking their own projects and surviving the winter.