I'm alive!

I guess you might say it's been for good reason that there hasn't been a recent blog post...

I've actually been too busy!

Let's give bullet points a go:

• September 16: Donald Miller - an author I enjoy - posted a blog saying that a movie he (and others) had been working on for years was being put on hold indefinitely due to lack of finances.

• I sent am email to a buddy of mine claiming a belief that they should have been able to raise the money, and I had a general idea how they should have gone about it.

• My buddy (Zach) said he would have said the same thing to me first if he'd had the chance.

• We knew a mutual friend of the author, and so we sent a hail mary email: Just two normal guys making a pitch to raise funds for a movie we had no part of. Typically you and I might refer to this as 'dreaming.'

• Within hours of sending the email - we heard back, "Tell us more."

• We bought some whiteboards and stayed up all that night in my garage putting together a pitch to raise an unknown amount of funds in less than a month. We sent it out on Friday.

• Sunday night - the Director-to-be, Steve Taylor, came over to Zach's place and met with us...he even bought us coffee. About midnight, Don conferenced in - and in a matter of days Zach and I went from Joe Blow's working the corporate gig to Joe Blow's working the corporate gig and in charge of spear-heading a campaign to raise $125,000 in less than 30 days.

• From there it's a bit of a whirlwind...we put together a viral marketing campaign in 5 days, launched www.savebluelikejazz.com, slept minimally, and tried to soak in an incredible story that somehow we landed upon. In the end the campaign raised just shy of $346,000. The movie was saved!

There's other news though...in the midst of all this, a couple really cool opportunities happened upon me. I was offered a gig to go cover the release week of what was anticipated to be one of the biggest record releases in recent history. The anticipation proved true! In fact - she's the latest (and one of the few) to sell a million copies in her first week! This was obviously an exciting gig, and one that allowed me to travel out to NYC and LA for the coverage. Along with that - once the movie was saved - Zach and I were both offered jobs on the set of the movie. While both these opportunities were beyond wonderful - they forced me to a crossroads: up until now, whenever good gigs came up I would take vacation from my day job and it all worked out. Well - turns out I didn't have 5-6 weeks of vacation time left. :)

That said - here I sit, proclaiming to you now...

I'm officially full-time Creative.

Exciting and scary are both terms that come to mind, but the adventure is on and I can't help but smile about it.

More soon, I promise.

JF