As the decade draws to a close, I thought it would be fun to go back and pull a professional highlight from each year.

I started the decade a couple of years into running my own company, Meeks Mixed Media, where I did a lot of various freelance video, animation, and web design/programming work.

2010

I was interviewed about Meeks Mixed Media by finance guru Farnoosh Torabi for her book Psych Yourself Rich. The Elance website (now defunct) suggested me to her since I was a prolific provider on their platform. It was super cool to get my name in print, even if I wasn’t exactly rich in those days… Far from it! I felt like I was finally starting to get somewhere.

2011

When we moved to Atlanta, GA on the promise of a full-time gig that vanished a month after we unloaded the truck, I was left scrambling to find work. I cold-called local businesses to see if they’d be interested in hiring me to create a “viral video” for them. A pizza shop responded, and after a fun meeting/taste-testing, we decided to move forward on a web series featuring the two brothers/owners as pizza-themed superheroes, fighting a “Legion of Doom” composed of chain pizza shop mascot parodies like “Wee Roman” and “Pizza Gut,” with “Papa Don” as their “guy in the chair.” The brothers had a falling out, so we only ever made the two-part origin story, but this project taught me a lot about animation, project management, and finding ways to insert my goofy creative voice into client projects.

2012

After a few years of slinging memes and making miracles happen as a member of the chatroom for a show co-hosted by magician and YouTube star Brian Brushwood, Brian asked me to join him in Jakarta for Mahakarya Magician, a live magic special featuring a dozen international performers. Think Indonesian American Idol in terms of popularity. I was the Director of Photography, which basically meant I filmed the trip for Brian’s Revision3 web series Scam School. Being escorted around Jakarta like a celebrity was all a lot of fun, but it isn’t why I picked this moment for 2012. One night, Brian and I sat at the hotel bar, drank watered-down beer, caught in a deep conversation about my creative ambitions. That conversation is responsible for pretty much everything I’ve done since, and I can never thank Brian enough for the impact he had.

2013

When I got back from Indonesia, I was filled with motivation, and soon after launched my first podcasting project with my partner Anne Marie. The show was called Greetings from Storybrooke, a fancast devoted to the ABC series Once Upon A Time. While we started it in 2012, we didn’t have many listeners until Daniel J. Lewis from ONCE Podcast invited us on for a roundtable with several other Oncecasters. Our downloads skyrocketed, and by the time Season 3 started in 2013 we were locked in as a top show in our niche. Legends of Gotham ended up being much more successful, but Greetings still holds a special place in my heart for getting us started. Its also my longest-running podcast, thanks to a handful of listeners who took over for me and Anne Marie when we had to give it up a couple of seasons before the show ended.

2014

Dogboy started as a short story I wrote for a college course, based on my childhood in Texas when I used to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night with a shitty homemade mask on to prowl the neighborhood. Then, it was a comic book pitch for Marvel Comics that almost went somewhere, before it didn’t. Then, it was a screenplay that got me in the door for general meetings when I lived in Los Angeles and led to me selling my first script, Horsepower Declining. In 2014, I took another swing at Dogboy as an actual novel. The self-publishing scene was thriving then, and an ongoing series was a great way to enter the marketplace. So, I started writing more Dogboy stories. My favorite is still Danger on Liberty Pier, an action mystery that helped me work through a lot of really sad things happening in my life around that time. I still owe the fans one last book (Dogboy: River of Time), which I hope to get to in 2020.

2015

As we created more podcasts, we decided to brand them together as UNIVERSE BOX… “Remember to think outside.” We created our flagship show, also called Universe Box, where we’d gather “stories” from our listeners, set to a new theme every week. The content was always diverse: A poem about Fear, a documentary about a trip home for the holidays, somebody pitching a Stick Stickly reboot for Nickelodeon. Every episode had something fresh and new and exciting, with costumes and props and games. Universe Box, the podcast, is the work I’m proudest of as a podcaster. It wasn’t our most successful project, not by a long shot, but I really felt like we were finding our “tribe” in 2015. At the end of the year, I got a job at Hearst Television and had to shut the show down, since it took so much time to prep every week and I wanted to make a good impression at my new day job. The ethos of this show is something I’ll be picking back up in 2020 with Do Anything Media.

2016

This is the year I threw myself hard into my work at Hearst Television. I’d taken quite a pay cut to work for them, and hoped putting in 110% during work and in the evening hours at home would get me a decent raise and bridge the gap. We were still doing podcasts, but it quickly became more of a grind than a calling as I struggled to carve a path within the corporation. I hosted a ton of training videos, wrote a ton of blog posts, recorded podcasts with News and Creative Services employees from across the country, and supported a lot of internal initiatives. I did my best work for them this year.

2017

This was a brutal year for me. My commitment to work took a hard left turn into web development and programming, partially my fault since I’d volunteered those skills. Still, I was basically a one-man frontend/backend development team and I freaking hated it. I like programming on a limited basis, but digging in 40+ hours a week to develop web apps was killing me. I was also making less than an entry-level web dev in Orlando, so 2017 was a year of exploring options and trying to either make more money or make the same amount of money using my creative skills. I sent out hundreds of resumes, went on dozens of interviews, almost got moved across the country a couple of times, but nothing ever quite added up to something good enough to leave the security of my corporate gig. One company, that ultimately couldn’t pay me quite enough to move to Texas, introduced me to a book called The One Thing. The book had a simple message: Find the one thing you want to do, and don’t do anything unless its in support of your “One Thing”. I decided my “One Thing” was creating entertaining content for an engaged audience, so I started developing projects to support that goal.

2018

After developing several concepts, I decided to push forward on a scripted “sketch dramedy” podcast called The Fakist. It centers around a news team as devoted to “making shit up” as most journalists are to reporting the real news. I think I’ve said important things between the jokes, a lot of it deeply personal. The main message, and the main lesson I’ve learned making the show? I believe in the inherent power of connecting with other people. The Fakist is also super silly with evil cat people, Fakist fake-outs, and a character named Handlebar Van Dyke. We’ve used over 100 actors in the two seasons we’ve done, and I’m looking forward to wrapping up the story with Season 3 next year.

2019

A few months before I left my job at Hearst, I had a fun opportunity to interview Barry Williams, TV’s Greg Brady, while he was in Orlando shooting a promo for MeTV/Hearst Television. I asked him about the Brady Kids cartoon series, and he seemed to appreciate the “deep cut” question. Greg Brady telling me I suck at dancing in the kindest way possible was an absolute honor. I wish I could post it! Maybe I could? Hard to say. I’d probably show it to you if you asked me.

Hell of a decade, but I think the next ten years are going to blow it out of the water.