How effective are you at connecting with your audience? Do you even really know who your audience is? Who are you even speaking to anymore?
These are questions many of us alive today have had to ask ourselves when we look in the mirror. However, it wasn't always that way. There was a time before the internet, before social media, and before smartphones. Technically, most of us alive today remember what it was like. There are those who refuse to enter the 21st century, and that's ok. It was a pretty cool century. The part I lived through, at least.
Some of us decided to be a part of the new millennium and attempt to adapt along with the changing world instead of holding onto the past. And a few of us twentieth-century foxes shook our asses for attention long before it was the normal thing to do because of social media. As a writer and former actor, I know the drill. There was a time when what I was doing was an outlier, trying to pimp out my screenplays and books or my abilities as an actor. Back in an era when most people waited for a phone call to find out what everyone was up to. Now, everyone is the center of their own little universe, and a text message or a social media post is all you may hear from someone for months or years. Now everyone is an actor playing the role of a version of themself. These masks of sanity we know too well. And for many, that may be enough.
I learned a lot in the corporate world. Some of it was actually good. It's all research. Thankfully, for a storyteller, living life has two purposes: the experience of living life in this moment in time and research. And I love life and research.
There are times I wonder why I am even shaking it anymore. I don't really do it for others. Those who had been listening as I used to bang on about the things that I was doing have drifted away. I suppose I still think it matters to tell stories, regardless if the audience is large or small. Whether it be here and now or somewhere down the road. It is, at its core, self-expression. Shining our inner light outwards.
I've definitely thought of just shutting it all down before. Just turn the lights off and lock the door. After the release of Monarch, I was exhausted and considered pulling the plug on this blog. I definitely took a step back from pumping out content. Just look at my blog archive on the right side of the page. The Writer's Realm has always been a place where I organize my thoughts and share where I am in my process. I can't tell you how many times over the past decade I have wondered if I should stop shaking things for attention. I mean, in the scheme of things, what does it all matter for anyway?
It matters because the work still matters to me. And in the end, that is what drives us all—what matters to us. Besides, I really enjoy the process. Chasing a story, digging into my memories while also viewing and experiencing the world as it is. From a creative pulp emerges something familiar and yet different than what came before. And in the end, I enjoy sharing it with others, and I still like writing blog posts, too. The posts are less about me shaking my ass for likes or sales, and more about me reflecting on my process and looking forward to what comes next. The name itself tells you all you need to know. Could I have changed it to A Writer's Realm or The Writers Realm? Sure. But it was never meant to be about anyone other than me. I am the writer, and this is my realm. It is the only place where I have dominion. It is my courtyard, and where I choose to discuss and share things in my tiny area of the world.
There is a scene in The Last Samurai that has stuck with me through the years—The Perfect Blossom. Nathan (Tom Cruise) and Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) talk of poetry and war as they walk through a garden courtyard dotted with trees filled with pink cherry blossoms. It's a brief but powerful scene.
Katsumoto is the last samurai, much like those of us still remaining from the 20th century are all that remain from a fading era. And yet we are still helping to shape this one. Hard to believe we are already over a quarter of the way through this century.
I feel fortunate to have grown up in a time before all of our lives became so connected to technology. Sure, we had phones, but they were landlines, and entertainment was also based on wires and paper pages, so you either had to listen to the radio, read a book, watch TV, play video games, or go to the movies. You can do all those things now while sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert or on a boat in the middle of a lake. And so I often remind myself how fortunate we were, even though it hasn't all been peaches and cream, to have lived in two different eras.
One that, for my generation in my nook of the world, was relatively peaceful and that can be looked back on with actual fondness. It wasn't perfect, but it was hopeful. I fear many will not have that, knowing only complicated times and not having a sense of hope for the future. It is both easier and more difficult to plan for what comes next, and therefore, it is doubly difficult for those who don't have those experiences already that have shaped who they are. At least they are growing up with technology and can master it in ways that none of us could have imagined was possible back in the day. Even if we had been preparing for it all our lives, with science fiction predicting the future throughout the 20th century. Those who grew up with all that as background noise are now creating a version of that future.
Every week, there is something new. Just the first month and a half of 2026, we've had massive updates with Kling 3.0, Seedance 2, Claude 4.6, Codex 5.3, Open Claw, & Gemini 3 Deep Think and 3.1. (As you can tell, I sat on releasing this blog post for a few months, for whatever reason, because we now have even more amazing models released over the past two months since I started writing this blog.) Had any one of those models dropped on its own at any time before 2023, the world would have collectively lost its shit.
We have entered the future. Not sure when that happened. Maybe it was 2020 or 2023. It's not quite what we expected, and yet it is here. Soon we'll see robots in grocery stores. Don't ask me when, but it seems inevitable. Some people cannot get around like they used to. If they had their own personal robot assistant, not a chatbot, but a robotic humanoid, they could send their assistant out to run errands or help them get out of a chair, and so many other tasks around the home.
There will also be the militarized versions as well. Killer drones and other devices are already here. Robots fighting other robots sounds ridiculous, but inevitable. How likely is it that we will leave this planet and make other planets our home? Whatever we do, AI will lead the way.
What small measure of influence might you or I have over what happens? That depends on our impact and reach. A few years ago, I started paying closer attention to the metrics on this blog. The numbers were so much greater than I expected, and yet there was little to no interaction from those who were visiting my blog and interacting with the posts. Then I realized the majority of interactions were likely bots. "Other" became my biggest fan. And that made me think about my impact and reach for today and tomorrow.
As a storyteller, my objective has always been to express ideas and tell stories that have excited me enough to spend months and sometimes years creating them. The hope was always to be able to instill in others the thoughts and emotions I had felt when writing the stories. As a screenwriter, I learned to accept that most of my written work would go largely unread and rarely ever be seen on a screen. Why? Making movies and TV shows is, or was, a lot of work that used to involve a lot of people. We are ticking closer to the point that I have been waiting for. When one person can take their entire library of unpublished and unproduced work and transform it into the medium of their choice.
This was one of the first things I thought about in 2023 after spending time with ChatGPT and Midjourney. Back then, things were very limited, but we all knew that things would continue to improve until we had reached a future that we had only seen in science fiction stories. We are there or thereabout now. And I have made changes to what I do as a result.
Twenty years ago, I never gave a thought to legacy. I was too busy trying to write every story that popped into my head. The result was that I would try to push a story to producers or publishers for a little while, and then get frustrated and jump back into my writing cave to write something else. I probably should have pushed harder to get more things published or produced, but since I didn't, I now have dozens of stories from the pre-AI era. Now, I can use my growing knowledge of AI to transform those stories into a variety of different media.
I know that there is enough AI slop out there. We all see it every day and cringe, but things have gotten so much better than in those early 2023 days. In three years, we have gone from the ridiculous Will Smith eating spaghetti videos to seeing the Seedance videos of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt. I am still not a fan of the live-action AI stuff; most of it still has moments of the uncanny valley peppered in. And once I can tell it is AI, I lose interest. That is why I am still less interested in AI video than some of the other mediums, for now.