Last year on my birthday, I wrote about a study published in The Guardian about turning 54.
That study concluded that fifty-four is the age that people lose their "get-up and go," meaning their "passion and grit."
I was determined not to succumb, and be another statistic. I was not ready to give up my energy and creative life. Not yet.
And here I am, turning 55, and, well, it has been a heck of a year since I made the pledge not to grow old, to be Peter Pan forever.
There have been great highs and great lows in these last twelve months.
The low, of course, was losing my dad in April.
He was eighty, and battled prostate cancer for so many years.
We're in the holiday season of 2024 now, and it's the first without him.
I miss him.
My whole family misses him.
It already seems like forever that my Dad has been gone. I hope I honored him and his incredible journey of resilience and strength with this diary entries I posted here on the blog early in 2024.
But the fact is that when you lose someone so important to you, you are never the same.
There is a new normal, but it is not the same normal.
Here, we are all clinging to one another, and charting a new way forward, because life must go on. But we all miss my Dad and his humble, patient, loving nature.
I have been so fortunate, this year, in other ways, that, I hope, keep me young, and looking to the next sunrise, the next horizon.
This past summer, I collaborated with a tremendously talented group of artists (of multiple generations!) to create our independent web series, Abnormal Fixation.
It is a comedy-horror show, silly to its low-budget core, and I have been go gratified not just to do the work with my friends, but to see the reception the web series has had on the film festival circuit.
Its reception so far has exceeded any expectation I had, in honesty.
So far, Abnormal Fixation has won awards for:
-Best Screenplay (Oniros Film Awards)
-Best Comedy Actor (Elegant International Film Festival) -- That's me!
-Best Actor (Alicia Martin) -- Magic Silver Screen, Critic's Choice International Film Festival, Script Symphony Awards
-Best Supporting Actor (Chris Martin) -- Elegant International Film Festival, Magic Silver Screen
-Best Sound Design (Tony Mercer) -- Oniros Film Awards, Magic Silver Screen
-Best Web Series (Script Symphony Awards)
-Best Indie Film (Cineverse International Film Festival)
And, our series teaser got over 41,000 views in two weeks, which is great. Our show premieres January 23rd, and I hope you will all watch it and see what the fuss is about.
Working with Kathryn, and Joel on Abnormal Fixation, and with all the other amazing cast and crew has been, in so many ways, a life-changing experience for all of us, with more excitement to come.
We are on an AF journey here in Muirland, for sure.
Also in 2024, Alicia Martin and I co-authored the first novel in a series about a psychologist dealing with the supernatural, The Subway Game, and we are hard at work on the second novel in the series.
If you want to read a great yarn, with a unique voice, I hope you will check it out!
I've also had the pleasure of seeing my work published in Filtered Reality, an anthology about found footage films, and on the Arrow Films UHD edition of A Simple Plan (1998).
Horror Films of the 2010s is also in preparation, at McFarland another whopping 300,000 word tome, and that's been fun to work on too, to revisit a decade of scary movies (even the elevated horror ones...)
And, I keep at this blog! In 2025, it will be my twentieth year blogging. In 2024, this blog has had 999,000 views, as of my birthday, today. (Overall, since starting 20 years, ago, it has had 10 million+). To celebrate two decades blogging, I'll be sharing my most read posts throughout 2025.
Last but never least, I continue to love teaching. I love my co-workers at South Piedmont Community College, and I cherish the opportunity to teach communications and humanities to a new generation of students, each semester.
So I don't know that I have any universal answers about the "turning 54" slump or conundrum, except for this:
Be with people you love, doing what you love, as much as you can, as often as you can.
Create. Collaborate. Share. Learn. And then do it all again.
Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.
