Entry 023: Being Creative and What Comes Next
I have never once not known what to make next. I'm not sure people understand how unusual that is.
There is a question I get asked often. Where do you get your ideas? I never know how to answer it. Not because the answer is complicated. Because the question assumes a problem I have never had.
The ideas arrive. That is all. At 2 a.m. In the shower. In the middle of a sentence about something else entirely. They do not ask permission. They do not wait. One morning you wake up and the film script you wrote has quietly attached itself to a summer you half-lived at fifteen, and the two things are now the same thing, and you did not arrange this. It simply happened. It has always simply happened. I have been this way since I can remember.
Klagenfurt. Early 1980s. My older sister collected a German film magazine called Cinema. I recorded films on VHS and made my own covers for them, cutting pages from her magazine for the images and typography I needed. I did not ask. She was not happy. I did not know then that I was being formed. You never do.
By fifteen I was in a graphic design apprenticeship, three years, split between the company and the Berufsschule in St. Pölten. I learned the lithographic process. How a design made with intention could be multiplied, could travel, could reach hands that would never know mine. There was something in that idea I have never fully let go of. I graduated with distinction. I was not surprised. I had loved (almost) every day of it.
By nineteen I was in a band. Heavy in the verses, tender in the bridges. We made Austrian radio once. Once. We celebrated like it was a world tour. I understand now what we were really celebrating. Not the radio. The proof. That something we made had traveled. Had reached someone we would never meet. That need has not left me. It has never left me. I have been making things my entire adult life. Not all of them made it.
An alternative sports magazine I conceived after the dot-com bust in 2002, a year before I started 110 Magazine which still exists today. The alternative sports idea I later tried as an app. I was invited to pitch this idea to the Axel Springer Media Entrepreneurs in Berlin in 2011, and I might add, I was the only person flown in from the United States. They eventually passed. Then Red Bull picked up the concept, ran with it for six month, and it landed on their project board and quietly died. Routine was a live workout class app I built in 2017, long before anyone was talking about the concept, years before the pandemic ultimately proved how powerful the idea was. I pitched it to major gym chains, including 24 Hour Fitness in the U.S. and McFit in Berlin, but both passed at the time. Ironically, when the pandemic hit and everyone suddenly started working out from home, the model I had envisioned became the norm. In hindsight, we all could have been billionaires if those “CEOs” would have had the vision. Mynte, a photo app designed to pay the user rather than extract from them. It never saw light.
In the late 2000s I built and sold magazine templates, QuarkXPress and InDesign, every genre you can think of, gaming, sports, cooking, the works. Ninety-nine dollars each. I sold a decent amount. Then Adobe released free templates for everyone and that business ended faster than a free buffet clears out. I did not complain. Better tools for designers is not something I am capable of being angry about. What I did not know then was that in six years the magazine industry itself would follow.
These things happened. I am not ashamed of them. They were real ideas. The timing was wrong, or the room was wrong, CEO’s without vision, or the world wasn't ready. You make the thing anyway. That is the only answer I have ever had.
Alternative Sports — From Magazine to App: The evolution of an idea from 2002–2011. Pitch Decks for Routine and Mynte. None of those ideas ever saw the light of day.
Then there is Gerda and Kai. Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen was one of my favorite stories as a child, but he left too many questions unanswered. Why does she take the children? Where does she come from? Why is she the way she is? I answered those questions. Wrote my own extension of his story. Filed the copyright in the United States under the title The Snow Queen. Disney came along, made their film, and changed the Wikipedia entry from The Snow Queen to Frozen after I showed them the filing. The children's book and audiobook, Gerda and Kai, is the illustrated version of that script. Available online. A story that began with a boy cutting up his sister's magazines and ended with a quiet dispute with one of the largest entertainment companies on earth. These things happen when you keep making things.
Gerda and Kai, 2011. Published two full years before Disney’s “Frozen.”
A film script called Blutsbrüder that ORF and RTL both independently compared to Stand By Me, loved, then passed on. A detective series called WEISS set at the Wörthersee, registered and waiting. And then the work that did find its form. An art book, REVEAL — The Power of Appropriation Art, published by Snap Collective. A novel that grew out of the Blutsbrüder script because I refused to let the story die. A playbook called Rebrands Without the Bullshit, twenty-five years of rebranding in the SF Bay Area, out in April. Twenty-three essays and counting. Paintings with thermochromic pigments that fade with heat, that do not illustrate loss but enact it in front of you, slowly, without resolution. A music album called Ghosts of the Ice, four songs written specifically for this project, for this voyage, for this exact moment.
Past, Present, and Future Projects: Reveal, Blutsbrüder and Rebrand Without the Bullsh*t
And I am not even going into my paintings or my professional work. The Webby Award. The Telly Awards. The Red Rock Film Festival Selection. The years with George Lucas at the Skywalker Ranch. The many rebrands, the campaigns, the design teams I led. That is a different list. This list is the one I made because I could not stop myself.
None of it required a prompt. None of it required a deadline, a commission, or an external reason. It required only the condition I have apparently always lived in. The persistent, low-grade certainty that something needs to be made, and that I am the one who needs to make it. I did not choose this. I am not sure it chose me either. It is simply what is there when I wake up.
People ask me sometimes if I am afraid of running out of ideas. No. I am not afraid of running out of ideas. I am afraid the ideas will not reach anyone. Those are not the same fear. They are not even close to the same fear.
Entry Fifteen of these essays is about exactly this. What I fear most is not the Arctic, not the cold, not the dark season, not any of the physical realities of sailing to 80 degrees north. What I fear is finishing the work and releasing it into the world and hearing nothing come back. The paintings, the essays, the album, made with full attention, offered with full honesty, and then: silence.
I have been making things for 40 years. The door has not yet opened in the way I thought it would. What is success? Is it simply finishing what you started? Or is it the financial reward that comes from completing it? Is it recognition? After all, even legends like Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, and Quentin Tarantino never won the Oscar for Best Director. I’ve often asked myself that question. I am still here. Still making things. I want to talk about that.
There is a version of this story that ends well. The artist persists. The work is eventually recognized. I do not know yet if that is my story. I am writing the version that is true right now, before the ending has been decided. The true version is this. Making things is not something I do despite difficulty. It is something I do instead of drowning.
I have more than 30 rejection letters from Los Angeles film studios for Gerda and Kai. Back in 2009, every film studio was chasing the next Harry Potter, style story. If only I had sprinkled a little magic into my script (being ironic) maybe things would have been different. Still, that didn’t stop me from turning the project into a children’s book and audiobook in 2011. When I wrote the Blutsbrüder script, two serious networks gave me careful, honest feedback. Both compared it to Stand By Me. Both found the characters real. Both passed. I could have stopped there. Instead I turned it into a novel, because a story that real does not deserve to exist in a drawer. You find the form that keeps it alive. You always find the form.
When I built the Ghosts of the Ice project, paintings, album, essays, residency, I did not wait for permission. The idea developed. Tests were completed to see if it even works. I wrote the songs. Then Svalbard accepted my application. Then the essays came. The project found its shape because I kept making things, and the things kept finding each other.
This is what I mean. It is not confidence. It is something closer to obligation. The work arrives. I follow.
I want to be careful here. I am not describing effortlessness. There are days when the canvas refuses. There are paragraphs rewritten fifteen times before they say the true thing instead of the almost-true thing. The almost-true thing is the enemy. It looks enough like the truth to fool you if you are not paying attention. What I am describing is something prior to effort. A certainty about direction. I always know what I am walking toward. That is the unusual thing. That is the thing I cannot fully explain.
Most people I know who want to make things describe the problem as having no ideas. Not knowing where to start. Waiting for the right moment. I listen to this with genuine puzzlement. The right moment does not come before the work. The right moment is the work, already in motion.
A friend who knows me well once asked: when do you sleep? She was not entirely joking. There is always something in progress. The essay before this one. The novel in revision. The album in the back of the mind. People who know my output and know my circumstances sometimes look at me with bewildered respect. Sometimes with something closer to concern. I understand both reactions.
This is also what being creative means, I think. Not just the paintings and the novels and the songs. The willingness to follow what arrives all the way to wherever it leads, even when the destination is not yet visible. Especially then.
I have been making things since I was a boy in Klagenfurt making VHS covers nobody asked for. The accumulation surprises me when I look at it whole. Not because I forgot any of it. But because it is larger than the sum of individual efforts feels, year by year. Something was being built the whole time. I was not always aware of it.
I am going to the Arctic this summer. I will make paintings that disappear. I will write about it. Something is already forming about what comes next. A new country. A new question. The next version of something I have been trying to say my whole life in different forms.
I have never once not known what to make next. I used to wonder if that was a blessing or a compulsion. I have stopped trying to decide. It is simply the condition I live in. The engine underneath everything. The reason I am still here when a reasonable person might have stopped.
What's after Ghosts of the Ice? I'll leave you with these hints. A person I have been looking for for 32 years, I exchanged 50+ letters with over eight years when we were teenagers, young adults and never met. A debt I owe that is not about money. A correspondence that ended 32 years ago with a final message written backward around the edge of a postcard.
The ideas keep coming. I keep following them. That is the whole story. And it is nowhere near finished.
“The right moment does not come before the work. The right moment is the work, already in motion.”
