Burned Out, Broken, and Then Brilliant: Ep 61

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where Eddie writes about entrepreneurship, reinvention, and identity.
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Guest Links: Godspeed, Cedar Key by Michael Bobbitt
Award Winning Short FIlm about Cedar Key - Rise of the Clambassador

Episode Summary:
 After a devastating personal loss, Michael Bobbitt left behind his old life and moved to a tiny Florida island. What followed was a creative explosion: a bestselling novel, a reclaimed identity, and a lifestyle rebuilt from scratch. In this deeply honest and often hilarious conversation, Michael shares how reinvention isn’t a trend—it’s a survival strategy. From building a theater with no experience to farming clams and writing fiction in a floating man cave, this episode is a playbook for anyone who needs a second act.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why personal collapse can spark creative brilliance
• How to reinvent your life when you’ve hit rock bottom
• What clam farming taught Michael about storytelling
• The DIY hustle that got his plays and books into the world
• The power of finding your real community

⏱️ Timecoded Breakdown
00:00 – Welcome & Setting the Scene
 Michael joins from his floating writing studio in Cedar Key, Florida.

01:00 – From Playwriting to Novelist
 How a love story gone wrong led to off-Broadway success and eventually, literary fiction.

06:00 – The Story Behind “Godspeed, Cedar Key”
 Michael’s novel about post-apocalyptic community and the beauty of resilience.

12:00 – Building a Theater from Scratch
 No one would produce his first play—so he did it himself. And packed the house.

19:00 – Clam Farming & Reinvention
 After his marriage ended, Michael found healing through physical labor and a new lifestyle.

25:00 – How Tragedy Leads to Transformation
 Michael and Eddie discuss the emotional cost—and reward—of radical change.

31:00 – Writing Process & Literary Inspiration
 From Faulkner vs. Hemingway to writing marathons and living edits.

38:00 – Final Thoughts on Possibility and Purpose
 A powerful conversation on failure, grit, and crafting your next chapter.

Join the NEWSLETTER at http://TransformYourFuture.com
where Eddie writes about entrepreneurship, reinvention, and identity.
 Get Eddie’s free course: 8 Ways to Supercharge Your Motivation & Crush Sales
 at https://bit.ly/8supercharge
Guest Links: Godspeed, Cedar Key by Michael Bobbitt
Award Winning Short FIlm about Cedar Key - Rise of the Clambassador 

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Transcript

0:00

Michael, welcome to Transform Your Future. I'm excited to sit down with you and discuss everything with you, get to know you a little bit more. How are you doing today for. Having me? I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me. So you're on the houseboat over in it's Cedar key, right? Yeah, I'm floating out in the Gulf of Mexico right now. Fantastic. I envy that. I envy that. I. Want to be mobile like that. I have a house here on the island too, but I set the houseboat up as a place to come and write and have quiet space to get away from the world, and it's like a grownup clubhouse floating out in the water. I love it. Very cool. It's like a. Floating man cave. That's it. That's it. So Michael, let's jump right in. I know we're going to talk about your book and I'm very interested to do that and talk about what got you interested in writing the book. What led you up to that, that you had this inspiration inside of you to get that out? Sure. So I've been writing since I was little, since elementary school, and about 10, 12 years ago, I wrote a play to impress a girl and 18 months later I was in the New York Times and I said, well, hell, I guess I'm a playwright now. Nine plays later, two off-Broadway premieres and productions all over the country of my place. I was just a playwright. I'm not even sure how much I liked the theater, but I mean, I guess that's a little bit of a joke, but I always wanted to write prose and I just never thought I was quite good enough at it. I didn't think I wrote dialogue worth a damn 12 years of Toiling Away as a playwright. I finally felt like I had the chops to do it, and when I moved out to this little island of Cedar Key, I discovered a totally magical world, and I've been coming to Cedar Key for 20 something years on the weekends. It took me all that time to figure out how to move here. I've been here about four years and I just knew I had to find a way to tell the story of this beautiful place that I love so much. I'm going to come up there and visit that island. I. See you on the. Put my feet on the ground. Boat. Yeah, boat. We'll show you the clam farm. We'll bounce around to some islands. It'll be great. So. What's specifically, well, I guess that was the inspiration was that you love that place and it's meaningful to you. So how did you come up with the story? Sure. So there's a running gag amongst people that know my writing well. They say, I only ever write about one thing. It's the power of the extended families that we make for ourselves as like a defense against the modern world. I'm constantly trying to find new ways to tell that story because those extended friendships and family have been so important to me. So I just thought, how can I conceive of a way to sneakily tell 180 year oral history of this place that I love? The thing about Cedar Key more than anything else is community with one another here, we practice it. We are checking on our neighbors. If someone's sick, we're bringing 'em soup. When you live this close to the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico is a rich provider. It's also an angry God and it comes for you sometimes and we have to all get together and fight back. Something about that whole dynamic was so unique, so increasingly rare in the world. I wanted to find a way to tell that story. And so I told a story about the island surviving in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. I thought what a better way to create a crucible of community. So that's how it came about. Yeah. So maybe it would be good for the audience if you just gave a little bit of a nutshell of the story, and I mean, we know it takes place in Cedar Key, and I know there's something about the power plant and the problems with the power plant. So if you're ever in Cedar Key, if you're down on Dock Street at one of our wonderful restaurants like Steamers or 83 West, and you look out across the Waka Sassa Bay there, you'll see the iconic familiar smokestacks from the Crystal River nuclear power plant. The nuclear reactor was taken offline and 2009, but those smokestacks were never torn down. So it's just for the last half century. If you've come to Cedar Kem, you're used to seeing them way off in the distance in the opening scene of the book, those smokestacks are enveloped in a microsecond of piercing light and simply vanish. And the people on the island never get very much information about what has happened. They just know that something cataclysmic has happened, and they're only left to determine that if whomever the enemy was had a bomb for the civilian power plant in Crystal River, Florida, surely only something approaching total War must have happened. So in addition to having to deal with the loss of technology and modern conveniences and the collapse of society, the folks on the island have to deal with the compounding dread of hearing almost nothing from the outside world. So they really have to lean on each other and you get to see some of that community I was talking about just in on Stark Display. That's great. That's great. I actually enjoy stories like that where it's kind of cut off from everything else. Those are always very interesting to me how people respond to React. For sure. So one of the things that I've liked the most from the reviews that have been out, we've got a wonderful review from Kikis, which is sort of the top of the game for literary reviews. Several of the reviewers have talked about how it's an end of the world story that doesn't focus on the end of the world. It focuses on the community and the really moments of beauty that you find even in the midst of despair. So I wanted to write an end of the world story that was only sort of about the end of the world. When was the book released? March 1st, and we've had a pretty amazing three months or four months, we've sold just over 10,000 copies out of a very small press called Wayward Writer's Press with a shoestring budget and not really knowing what we were doing to market. We've recently hired a publicist. The response has been so fantastic, but I had reached the end of my ability to draw on all the years of support from the theaters that have put on my plays, and I just realized that there was a lot about marketing that I didn't even know that I didn't know. So we hired some professionals and now we're really getting out there and trying to push this story out. I wanted to make sure that the book was as good as I thought it was, and when I saw the overwhelming response from the folks that have read it, I thought this is a story that will resonate beyond my little island, beyond the state of Florida, even hopefully beyond the folks that like to read dystopian into the world stuff because it's a story about people that care about one another. I'm just curious. That's fantastic. From what I understand about the industry, because I, I'm working on a book right now, I've always wanted to write a nonfiction book because I love nonfiction and I've read so many over the last 25 years that I wanted to emulate that. Doing a lot of research and finding out self-publishing, hybrid publishing, all these different models. It seems like if I think if you sell four or 5,000 books, that's a lot. So selling 10 is like a great accomplishment. I feel so overwhelmed by it. I guess they say if you're a self-published author, they say the average number of books you sell is something like 200. And even a first time author at one of the major publishing houses, if you sell 5,000 books, that's considered okay, they didn't lose us a bunch of money. This kid maybe has some promise. So to go from a little small literary press like ours to have this kind of a success has been just so humbling and life affirming and also infuriating. Why did I wait all this time to get started in the medium I knew I wanted to write in with these books? I'm kidding about that. I think I came to it at exactly the right time. I think I've finally arrived at the place in my life where I have something meaningful to say, and I had developed a wide enough audience from the place that there were people who were interested in what I had to say and seeing it all come together like this, it's been just totally wonderful. Did you have, I don't know, an email list or something like that? I mean, not really, just so especially when the pandemic came around, I got a little bit famous writing a play about the underground drug and sex culture at The Villages, the world's largest retirement, and that play has just been a barn burner. Everywhere that play plays, they sell out the entire run. It set the 97 year attendance record at the big theater here in Gainesville, Florida, and it sets attendance records everywhere it plays, and that thing just will not end. I got into a hot tub naked with five old ladies to be able to write that place. So I did the research. But so when Covid came around, a lot of especially small theaters around the country were really struggling to keep their doors open because they either had to shut down or if they could have plays, they had to have socially distanced audiences. So a place that might normally hold 200 people by law, they could only fit 25 people in there, maybe 40. And so they had no money for royalties or even just to pay the basic expenses. So I donated all of my plays for free to anyone that wanted to put them on, and I think I engendered enough goodwill during that process that when I had a book out, it was pretty easy to reach out and say, Hey, I have this new scary endeavor that I'm on, and I'm hanging out here on a ledge and worried that I'm going to fall on my face. If you've got any support to offer, I'd sure love it if you took a look at this book. And it was just so joyful to see the response. We held a book launch party here on the island. It's not easy to get to Cedar Key. We're 35 miles down a one way road. It's not a place you can just happen upon. And we had five, 600 people at this book launch party at the Historic Island Hotel here on my island. We had New York Times bestselling authors here. We had live bands and music, and it was this enormous event, and I just felt like any good thing I ever did in the world was coming back to me, and it was great. That's fantastic. You're a good guy. I mean, I could tell just from the first moment I met you that you're a good guy. You got an open heart. So I think that's awesome. And I think that shows and the universe replies back in kind, right? That's what you put up there. It does, but it doesn't always do it quickly. Sometimes it's a, I needed it now. I put every red set I had into this book, and it was just nice to see it arrive on time. It was just magic like this island. Totally magic. Typically, the things that I'm interested in is reinvention and identity and personal growth. So I want to ask you, during this process from when you started, I imagine that in the beginning when you started writing plays that it was rather challenging and there was probably some setbacks and obstacles. What kind of setbacks and obstacles have you had during your writing journey? I know we have this great thing that's happened now and you've got sold 10,000 copies and you're on your way and you're writing the sequel. What did you have to go through to end up. Here? Well, I'll tell you, it's a pretty neat story about my very first play and being a playwright is a lonesome difficult, self punishing path in the world. Because normally, first of all, there are so many plays and there are so few theaters and so few slots in a theater season that the odds of ever getting produced when you write a play are astronomically against you. Maybe you write plays and you send them off to contest, hoping to get selected, or maybe you fight and scratch and claw and get a community theater to put on a stage reading of your play. Well, I didn't know any of that. I just wrote this play and I thought it was great my very first play, and I sent it to every theater in town and didn't get a call back, and I thought, well, that can't be right. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I rented an abandoned building downtown in Gainesville and used my own money and converted it into a theater and mounted a production of this play having no idea what I was doing. And shockingly, we sold every ticket every single night. It was just, we were able to pitch it that, hey, here's come see the play that no other theater would put on. Come see a guy losing everything he owns to put on a play. And it was just the people just kept coming, looking back on it. Now, I'm a little embarrassed by that play. It was early in my, it may be technically it wasn't, but to see the community of folks that came together to produce the thing, the actors, the techs, the folks running the lights, the people doing the tickets, the people making cookies to sell at our concession stands so we could pay the electric bill. So yeah, we couldn't get the play produced. So we built a theater, and when the other theaters in town saw that this huge audience had come to this probably terrible play, well, then when I started writing good plays, it was a lot easier to get my phone calls returned. And from then on out, every single play I ever wrote got produced and got produced to widespread acclaim. And I'm told from other playwrights that this is not a real thing. It's not possible for that to happen. Yeah, it sounds like a fantasy. Yeah. 18 months after I wrote my first terrible play, I had a play premiering off Broadway in New York City, and then another one the next year. And right at the height of the Florida man hysteria, I wrote a play called Florida Man about a Florida man that digs up his dead father to give him the proper Viking funeral he always wanted. And that thing, just at the height of the Florida man hysteria, that thing took New York by storm. I think I've had sort of an enchanted path in the writing world. I don't think it's supposed to go this way, but it has my second. Go ahead. The. Writing Gods have been good to you? Well, I think so. For my part, I've worked my tail off. I tell people all the time that the principle ingredient is just work. It's impossible to always be the smartest or the most gifted or the most talented person in whatever field of human inquiry you want to do. You can't control that. You can control how hard you get after it, and I am possessed with an abundance of energy. I burst out of bed like this, and I can barely fall asleep at night, and I can't wait to get up and get going the next day. So I tell people, the worst thing in the world for me is to have five minutes of quiet to ponder what a piece of crap I am. So instead I just keep working. That's good. That's good. I identify with everything that you said about that. That's right. I feel the same way. I don't have time for morro self introspection. I'm too busy. No, no. Lemme get after it. I'll fall so far down the existential rabbit hole of dread that I can't handle it, so I got to just keep moving. So my second play, I wrote a play and decided that the best way to make this play work is to write an eight minute monologue delivered to a live goat on stage. So I got a theater. I talked the theater into letting me build a fence, a pen on the stage, and I brought in a live goat that was an integral part of the show, and I think just the curiosity about how in the hell can you have a goat and a play? We sold out every ticket to that play too. It just seems like from one show to the next, there was always something that, and by then, by about my third show, they thought, well, surely this redneck can't be this good at theater. Surely by the third show he'll be terrible and we can come laugh at him. So half my audience comes to really rebel in the things that I create, and the other half come certain now is when they'll get to see me fail. And as long as I keep saying not today, then I get to keep doing. I have a couple of questions. So what was the name of the first play? Yeah, so the very first play was called Across the River. I just don't think it was great. There were some funny parts, and it was a father son story, which I liked those kinds of stories, but I didn't know enough about the craft of writing for the stage for it to be real, real good, but somehow audiences still really responded to it. The second play was called Trailer Park Elegy. I grew up in a trailer in Orange Grove in central Florida, so it was a story about French culture, French characters pushed to the edge of their tolerances in the world and still finding grace and dignity again in the extended family and community they've made for themselves. And then right after that came Sunset Village about the underground drug and sex culture at the villages. And that thing has just been a runaway train. I wrote the sequel to that Return to Sunset Village. I'm working on the third one set at a nudist RV park in the Florida Keys. And then I wrote a play about Cedar Key. I wrote a play about the set in the only play not set in Florida, said in West Virginia at Harpers Ferry where the Shenandoah and the Potomac come together, really the cradle of American democracy about weird autonomous AI killer robots and one family pushing back against the darkness of certain collapse. I like to write stories that are grandiose, but told, really small, told in a handful of characters that you really get to spend some time with and get to know. Going back to that first play, one of the things that strikes me is you were willing to go all in. You were just willing to just bet the entire farm on yourself and go all in and take this big risk of just getting a building and putting it together. And like you said, not really knowing what you're doing or how you're doing, you just know you're going to do whatever it takes to get it done. Yeah. Bravo to that. That's probably all your success wrapped up in that one thing right there, that you're willing to take risks, push yourself, go all in and do whatever it takes. I think. So that's what I see. I agree that is true, but I'm here talking about the good stuff. It's also been the principle ingredient of every catastrophic failure I've ever had as well. So that's just part of the game. And to me, I'm willing to be embarrassed. I'm willing to be humiliated. I'm willing to fail and fail and fail as long as I'm in charge of that, as long as it's my effort that determines it. And if I'm just not good at something and I fail, then I learn that. I learn, Hey, maybe this isn't for me, or maybe I need to make an adjustment. I'm always willing to do that. And I think a lot of folks in the world are maybe afraid of the embarrassment or afraid of the loss. And to me, failure is just, it's a way to learn something new about myself, and maybe I have a lack of shame that I'm willing to fail in a big way and fail publicly. But I think their stories all throughout American history, not just in the arts, but in industry and history in general, where you have to brave to reach the brass rig. I mean, fortune favors the bold, and I'm bold and stupid, so I keep doing. I don't know if you're stupid, but maybe you're stubborn like me. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. What I'm curious about though is I think where many people suffer in a sense is that they struggle because the people around them don't understand the risks they're taking or what they're doing, so they're rather negative, right? For sure. Did you have people telling you You're crazy? What are you talking about? You're going to go start producing plays? I mean, there were definitely folks from the other part of my life, from the business world that just thought, what? I mean, I own a real estate appraisal company. I have another life outside of the arts. Those folks, I went to college on a golf scholarship. So I mean, those kind of folks thought, these people are not going to accept you. This isn't your world. What are you doing? But again, I felt comfortable about the folks that I had surrounded myself with in the art world, and I believed in them. And when they showed a little bit of belief in me, I mean, that's all I needed. I could shut out. I could shut out the rest. The other part though is not just hubris or not just being able to brave at a thing. The other part is you have to actually get really good at something. One of my favorite things a reviewer has ever said about me as a playwright specifically is that he said, Michael Presley. Bob is a playwright in the same way that a shipwright builds ships by making him layer by layer, by doing each of the small one task after another until it's done. And it dispossesses us of the idea that the creative folks are just supremely talented or there's some divine inspiration, and then the work comes out. I spent a long time reading and working and making one bad thing, and then the next thing was slightly less bad. So I'm just a big proponent of you've got to really dig in and get real good at something because you can take all the risks you want. You can put all the good people around you that you want, but if you don't get real good at something, there's not born gifted. I feel so strongly about that because if that's the case, then I have to change my worldview. My worldview is that everyone on planet Earth can find something to be miraculously amazing at, and if we're just born into it or we're not, that's a bleak picture of the world that I can't accept because I don't think I was born especially gifted in any particular thing. I just worked real hard on it until I crafted those skills like a shipwright learned all of the individual skills required to build the ship. I just love that. I agree. I agree 100%. I mean, and that's one of the basic fundamental beliefs I have, is that anybody can change their life, reinvent themselves and be whatever it is they want to be, as long as they're willing to put in the effort to do it. I like to say that anything is possible, but I mean, of course within the laws of physics and gravity, right? That's, you're not going to float. You're not going to fly. You're not going to wake up tomorrow and be seven feet tall and play in the NBA. But besides those things, there's a whole lot of possibilities for us. If you're willing to put in the work, learn and be resourceful, which is what a lot of what we're talking about with you is you're very resourceful. You go out there, you find the information, you find the people, you find the place you get, no, no, no, and then you go do it. Anyway, that's being very resourceful. So one of the reasons why I was so excited to be on your show here is that the whole idea of transformation and of a second life, my entire life here on this island is the result of great personal loss. It came to this island. First of all, I'd love this island for 20 years. I got my pilot's license 23 years ago. We have a tiny little runway here on this island. It's the shortest one in Florida. So when you get your pilot's license anywhere in North Florida, part of that whole process is to fly here to Cedar Key and land on the little runway with water on both sides. The first time I flew in and saw the island, I was hooked. I started coming most weekends for 20 years, and then about four years ago, my marriage fell apart. My wife left me. It was a marriage that I didn't want to end. I didn't see it coming, and I was just blindsided. And I sat on my little farm outside of Gainesville for a few months just in despair, wondering what to do with myself. And I just thought, in the back of your mind, you've always thought that you might like to move to that little island. What's stopping you? I got in my car. I drove to the island. There was 140 year old house for sale that was falling into the Gulf, and I made an offer on it that day, and I got it. And just the process of the two years, it took me to renovate that house and get it back to livable. This whole process has been a reinvention for me. And when I got here, I found out quickly that the entire economy, the culture of the island is all predicated on aquaculture, on clam farming. And I just thought, you know what? If I'm going to be all in my new island home, I got to learn about clam farming. I met the mayor here, Heath Davis, fantastic guy, become my best buddy, and he has a clam farm. And the process of learning how to become a farmer, an underwater farmer of all things, it was the greatest reinvention of my life. And it was in that process that I found the story I've been waiting to write in a long form novel my whole life. Finally, there was something worth writing about. It was this place and these people, and I had to come to Cedar Key to find people worth writing about. So for me, the idea of second chances, I was 42 years old and my life had collapsed around me, and I just thought everything I'd ever done meant nothing. And I was alone. And then this island and these people were a reason for me to believe again. So it's why I've been so interested in your show, second chances and reinvention. Oh. I love it. It's so exciting, and I am so happy for you. I identify with it. It's like a lot of times these tragedies, these things that happen that are beyond our control, that we feel like it's the end of the world and oh my God, how does this happen to me? They end up in my life often being the impetus that changes so much of my life, and I take the opportunity. There's an opportunity there. Yes, it's an ending of something. And I didn't want that, whether it was my relationship with my wife or I love drugs. I love drugs. I love partying. I never wanted a party to stop, but it totally screwed me up and screwed up my life, and I had to do something about it. And I thought it was the end of the world, and it turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened. Right? And I was able to reinvent myself and become somebody else and become a successful guy and go off some of those other things about myself that I didn't really like. And you buy into some things that were inside of me, these dreams and ideas that was always inside of me, but now I had the ability to do it now, this moment. So it's always been like that, a history of that. And I love that, and I try to share that with more people. And I'm glad that you're sharing that story because people need to know, because so many people, they hit these obstacles and they have these challenges and they become depressed and despondent, and they feel worthless, and it's their fault. They beat themselves up, oh my God, why did I let this happen? When really it's like it was a wonderful opportunity hidden in there to just break away and do something different and become something different, and just enjoy, build the life that you want to enjoy. Do it. I love it. I love it. I think as human beings, it's so easy for us to get in a comfortable rut where we say, this is how our life looks. This is how it feels and smells and sounds, and this is who I am forever. And so sometimes when we get shaken out of that comfort zone, even with great tragedy and loss, like the loss of my marriage at the time, I would've done anything. I would've compromised any value. I would've done anything to just make it go back to the way it was. But now, four years later, I still mourn the loss of that relationship, but I would never have made it to this island. I would never have met the people that I met here. I would've never written this book. I would've never found the first place that felt like home down in my guts. And I just think it's hard to see the forest for the trees sometimes when you're right in the thick of the despair, it's hard to see it. So I like telling this story because I like the idea that we're always just one little change away from a whole new life. And what's great about that is that we never have to get old, not just because I'm perpetually immature and silly, but as long as there's a possibility for reinvention. I'm 40 years old now. Maybe I'll write books for 10 more years and then maybe I'll write screenplays. Who knows what I'll do? The fact that there's an infinite amount of possibility as long as you got your health, I think it makes the whole span of life an adventure. Yes. I think it's magical what you're talking about when you look at children, children have this magical view of everything, and we lose that when we become adults. That's right. And the world eats us up and spits us out, and we have to deal with loss and suffering and pain. But the truth is, is that really, it can be magical if you're willing to look at it that way. I agree. If you're willing to be hopeful and be willing to do whatever it takes to get where you want to be. That's right. Because there's many people who have dreams and ideas, but you don't have the willingness to do whatever it takes to get there. They say, yes, I could have done that, and I could have been this, and I wanted to do that, but I really didn't know anybody and I didn't have the right resources, and I didn't have the money. But some people like you and me, we just go out there and just keep going and keep going, falling on our face until we make it work. That's right. And I think you just, so for me, again, I came from nothing. I grew up in a trailer in an orange grove. I'm the first person to ever graduate from high school in my family and first person to ever go to college. And not that those things are required to be able to succeed in the world, but at no point in my life did I ever feel like that my horizons were limited. And I have to think, my mom and dad were just unfailingly supportive of me, and they believed in me from an early age. So I had a foundation of support where I had, I think a healthy sense of self-confidence from my childhood. And I know that a lot of people don't get that. And so for the folks that don't get that, it's even more important, I think, to find your community out there in the world. And for me, it's, it's just been everything. And to be able to live in a place where we take care of each other and to be able to live in a place where every single day I see three more stories that are worth writing about, I just feel like I've hit the jackpot. Yeah, because one of the keys about all this I think, is that you have to be able to notice what's around you. You need to be noticed what you're noticing. You need to be able to live in the moment and be here and be mindful of here. And now, so many people just are running around thinking about what they're going to do tomorrow and next week or thinking about their past, that whatever's happening really now, they're really not seeing it. It's like you get in the car to go somewhere, you're going to go to the mall, but you start driving the car towards your job because you're mindless right now. You're not mindful of what you're doing and where you're going. And I think we do that a lot in our lives. We are just mindlessly doing things. So you're mindful, and so you're aware and you're interested and you're excited, and then you see these things and you're like, Hey, that's a really cool thing right there. I can imagine you going and talking to somebody saying, Hey, what are you doing over there? That's interesting. It's kind of magical and beautiful, and I love it. I want to talk a little bit about your writing for a second. What is your routine for writing? Do you have a routine set for that? Tell me a. Little bit about it. Sure. So I wouldn't call myself a super Stephen King fan, but I read a neat article by Stephen King where he said, if you're working on your novel for two or three years, you're not working on your novel. If you haven't finished your novel in six months, you're not really working on it. So for me, I go about it. I do the shipwright process of writing plays. I sit down and make time to do it, and I just write when I figure out a topic that I want to write about. When I knew that I wanted to write a post-apocalyptic story about this island surviving against great odds, and I knew that I wanted it to be a vehicle to tell 180 year oral history of this place, once I figured that out, well, there was a lot of work to be done. There was a lot of gaps in my knowledge about the history of this place. So I probably spent six months learning everything I needed to know about the thing I wanted to write about. But when it comes time to write, I write furiously fast. I wrote the place, sunset Village that we talked about. I wrote it in six days in just an absolute fuke state where I'll sit down to write and I'll write for 10 or 12 hours sometimes, and I'll write really quickly and then give it slowly edit over two or three or four months. Hemingway famously said that the first draft of anything is shit, and he's right. So the genius is in the rewrite, but for me, especially since. Yeah, I think he was famous for saying something along the lines of, just get it all out. Don't read it. Don't do it. Throw it all out there and then you'll make the book in the editing process. Yeah. Now, for the record, I'm a Faulkner fan ahead of Hemingway. You have to be one or the other, I think. Oh, me too. Yeah. I like the slow Ous sentences. In fact, I describe, and I think my editors describe Godspeed Cedar Key as literary fiction because I think it's much more Faulkner than Hemingway. I want to take my time and really describe everything and really let you soak in the meaning of a thing. And then I. Bought, Hey, I just have to tell you. I just have to tell you on aside, I love Faulkner also. And I remember as I was reading many of his novels, I remember finding a story that he wrote as I lay dying. I think when he was working a job shoveling coal into a furnace, and he would shovel coal in the furnace. And then once it was enough to fire for a little while, then he'd sit down, he'd write, and then he'd go back to it again. I was always fascinated by that story. Coal covered hot steam sweating, and he's sitting there writing. And I just love his masterful use of language. Just to me, the process of a piece of literature is not just the story. I can see a story on Netflix going to, and I believe this about readers too. If I'm going to ask you to spend 20 or 30 hours to read my novel, I want to give you a full sensory experience. I want you to be able to appreciate the poetry of the language. One of my favorite reviews called My Prose almost poem, almost poetic. I love that. I love the idea that if you're going to say a thing, why not say it in an artful way? So that's part of, anyway, I bought this old 50-year-old houseboat that was completely in disrepair, and I had finished building my house, and this houseboat had been a crystal meth lab. These fellows were using it to cook crystal meth, and it blew up and caught on fire, which I think turned their enterprise sour. So I was able to buy the boat super cheap, and I had finished renovating my house. So I started in renovating the houseboat, and now I've got this little floating sanctuary, also the title of a Flockner novel. So I come down here on the water and I have an old rickety dock. You've got to get down to get to the boat. No one's coming down that dock to see me. So I know that when I get down at the end of that dock and get on this boat, I get to control the four walls of this world here on this boat and all this stuff that I write and create, I do here on the water. And especially because Godspeed Cedar Key is a story about being on the water. It's about a community living in and with the Gulf of Mexico. It was nice to ride it here sitting on the. Water. By the way, you've mentioned several times about rebuilding the house and rebuilding the boat. So I'm just imagining it's you doing it. It is right. You're actually hammering nails and. Sure. So my dad was a carpenter and a masterful carpenter. I think he didn't finish the eighth grade, but was maybe the smartest one of the two or three smartest people I ever met in my life. You could say 57 times, 85 or whatever. And he would say 52, 84, he'd give you the answer that just like a computer of a brain, and to watch him with a hammer and a nail a level. And he passed away about 10 years ago of cancer. And because I had went to college and I was bookish, and we were very different in those waves. And so as I got to be an adult, I spent all of my childhood thinking I wanted to be different than my dad. And as I became a man, I had spent the rest of my adult life trying to be more like him. And so really trying to soak up as many of the skills that he had is what led me to wanting to learn how to renovate things. Every time I do a project like my house or the boat, and I had help on the house, but I did the boat all on my own. I feel like my father's son, and I still have the red hammer that he was 150 pounds soaking wet. And I'm a big guy. I'm six foot tall and 200 pounds. He was 150 pounds soaking wet. But in his powerful left hand, he could sink a 16 penny nail and two mighty blows. And he was just the kind of man that men aren't anymore. He was forged in Arkansas, heat and poverty. And the older I get, the more I want to be like him. So anytime I'm working with wood or taking an old thing and making it new again, I get to be my father's son. So your process then is you choose a project, you have some inspiration, you want to make a project, and then you work to do whatever research is necessary. And then you sit down and you just open the floodgates and just get it all out of you. And then another thing I do is that I put myself on public record that I'm doing a thing so that if I don't do it, I'm embarrassed. So when I decided I was going to write Godspeed Cedar Key, I wrote the first page. I posted it on Facebook and Instagram, and I said, I'm writing this novel about Cedar Key. It's going to be the greatest thing you've ever seen, and I'll have it. It'll be out within the year, and I would talk about it all the time. So I knew that, and I would periodically put out little snippets for people. And I knew that if I quit or gave up, that I, I'd have no credibility left in the world. So I like to put myself under arbitrary, meaningless deadlines and under the risk of public ridicule, and that kind of keeps me up. Yeah. I'm one of those people who never really talk about accountability that much because I've always just made myself accountable in about. I've always talked about things with the other people, the people who love me and support me. And I've always said, Hey, this is what I'm doing, and I'm going to get this done, and I plan on doing this, this, and this, and I'm going to get there by this time. I've always done that, whether it was losing weight or changing jobs or building a new business or whatever. I've always done that. And so when people talk about, let me offer you accountability, because I'd be like, I do accountability all day every day. I don't need a special person to say, you are going to be my accountability partner for God's sakes. Yeah. It's funny how similar men we are. I know. And I think it's interesting how things work and how we always find each other. I find a lot of the people who come on the show, I have really deep identifications with a lot of them. So are you. From New York? You have a Northeastern accent? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a kid from the Bronx. I'm from the streets of New York. City. So my brother lives in New York. He's a special effects guy there in the movie. So I spent a lot of time there since I started putting my plays on. But on the surface, you and I couldn't be much more different. You're from New York and I'm as southern as they come, and I love that. I love when people from disparate backgrounds find That's really terrific. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And we both love. Right? That's pretty. Cool. I don't. Find a lot of people like Faulkner. Anymore. Well, it's challenging. It's an investment to read a Faulkner book. It's slow. Sometimes you got to read a page two or three times, but it's so rewarding when you finally crack the code. And I love it. I mean, I like to read less literate things too. I mean, when the Hunger Game series came out, I think my son was in the second grade and all his little buddies were reading it. And I picked it up one day and I read straight through all three books. And when I got to the last page, when Kanes is talking about how she still continued to choose peta, I cried my damn eyes out. So I like regular stuff too. But if push comes to shove, I'll take the collected words of Faulkner and put me on an island, and I'll be just fine. Yes. I'm so proud of you, bro, that you've done these things and I look up to you for that as inspiration. I appreciate you saying that. So while I got you here, I'll tell you about one other thing that I love to do here on the island. So here, our high school mascot here we're the Cedar Key Sharks. We're the smallest public school in Florida, so we're always struggling to get money to keep the school going. So I started a charity swim I do every year called the Cedar Key Shark Swim where there's a little barrier island, a half mile off the coast of our island. And one day I'm sitting with the mayor and I say, Hey, have you ever slammed out there? He goes, I never have my grandparents generation. Everybody did. It was a rite of passage for 12-year-old boys to swim to the island in back. And I said, we ought to see if we could get some folks together and see if we can swim over there. And why don't we make it a charity thing? Well raise money. We'll give it all to the school. This August, we're about to do our third annual why. We raise thousands of dollars every year for the school. People come from all over the country now, and it's this wacky thing. There's a handful of folks who are trying to win the race, but most folks are taking their time. They're on floaties or inflatable shark rafts. And it's just another example of how community has been so important to me. And the waters that we swim across are loaded with sharks and the idea that we're swimming with the sharks for the sharks, it's so fantastic. So if we get you here on the island, sometime one of these years, I got to get you to the Sharks Swim and see if you can make it out to the island and back. I'm going to go all in on that. I'm going to go all in on that. Yeah, pretty good. Cedar Key Shark swim.com. Check it out. It's such a fun time. Oh my gosh. I am. I want to check that out. There's video up there. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's. Just. You'll see 250 people in the water dressed in wacky shark outfits, and it's just an amazing time. And there'll be another five or 600 people on the beach. We close off a big section of the road along and we have a big block party and live music and food, and it's just this amazing celebration of community. I even snuck a story about the Shark Swim into my book. It's so much fun. I imagine your marketing strategy on Cedar Key was mainly networking with everybody and getting the word out right? Yeah, that's how it. Started. I reached out to any place I ever gave one of my plays for free and said, Hey, I'd love it if I could have a book signing at your theater. I'd love it if you just tell the folks in your community about my book. And I also have a kind of habit of just making a fuss about myself. I do silly fake weather broadcast where I pretend like I'm a real weatherman and give totally absurd weather broadcasts. So much so that Jim Kori from the Weather Channel found out about my weather broadcasts. And after Hurricane Idalia ravaged our island, he came to the island and got on my clam boat, and I took him out to show'em all the devastation. And we did a fake weather broadcast together. So I'm always trying to do things to entertain folks. So because I'm always making a fuss, I think a lot of people bought the book just to see what the fuss was all about. And so like I said at the start of the interview, it's been totally overwhelming what we've been able to do just from a grassroots community perspective. But I've reached the end of that. And I want this because the story has resonated so widely. I wanted to really get it out there. So I've reinvested some of that money we made from selling the books into a really a top notch publicity firm. And we're trying to really move beyond the horizons of what I can reach my arms around. I believe that you will. I appreciate you. Saying that. I believe that you will. I believe you're all in. I'm in. One of the great things about being all in is I am always coaching people, especially entrepreneurs and commission only salespeople. And I made a statement about that it might take a few years, and this person was a few years, and I was like, yeah. So if you could live your dreams and have the things that you really wanted, it took you five, 10 years to get there, wouldn't it be worth it? That's right. I don't understand. Because for me, if it takes me 10 years to reach a goal, I'm all in. I'll do it because I want the goal. That's right. And if that's what it takes, that's what it takes. I'm ready for that. I. Enjoy the grind. I enjoy the intermediary steps between when I start and when I get there. I like all of it. I like the process of signing books. I like the process of writing. I like the process. Hey, if I'm in an elevator with you and you're listening to my pitch about the book, I want to tell you all of it. It's not just, I mean, certainly the success we've had has felt really gratifying, but even if it hadn't been as big of a success, the process of getting to write a story that matters to me, and if just a handful of people reached out and said, Hey, I really connected with these characters that you made, and it really meant something to me when this character did that, if I only had a handful of those, I'd do it again. It'd be worth it. And the fact that I've been able to have that experience with just so many people, I am just energized. I am in the sequel now. I've got a third book outside of this series planned. I'm excited to just. Keep writing. That's the thing, when you have a passion for something and you've built that expertise, that muscle, you've layered that on like you're talking about, the gratification is in that. It's not necessarily in the success, right? Success is fleeting and whatnot, and it's great for people to appreciate you. That's wonderful. But really the satisfaction is in getting it out on a piece of paper. Absolutely. And I have a 23-year-old son that he's just moved to the island. He just finished college and he just bought a house here on the island. He's come home to learn clam farming and some other things. And he's a really creative guy too. A big part of why I do what I do is that I want him to see an example of someone that's willing to risk it all that's willing to get out there and get after it. And if I'm able to leave behind a few things that will make him think about his dad when I'm gone, I mean, what else is there? And for him to get to be at the book, launch party with me, and get to see all the people that came in from around the country because of a thing that his dad made. I mean, it's everything. So before we wrap up here today, is there anything that you want to tell the audience or maybe a question I failed to ask you that you want to talk about? No, I do. I've done a lot of interviews. This one has been absolutely delightful. You're really good at this. You hadn't missed a thing just when I worried that I was going to run out something to talk about. You steered the conversation in an interesting way. So on that end, no. I would love to encourage you to get Godspeed Cedar Key. You can get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, anywhere you buy books. You can go to our publicist website@waywardwriterspress.com. Reach out to me, michael presley bible.com. I'd love to talk with you. And if you end up on Cedar Key, stop and ask anybody on this island where I live, and they'll point you to my house and I'll take you on the boat. Come on out. We'll show you Cedar Key. Well, Micah, I'm going to take you up on those. Offers, by the way, personally. Hey, you know it. I'm going to drop your, yeah, you don't know it yet, but we're going to be friends, you and I. It's a bad. Deal. We are fast friends. I'm going to drop that information in the show notes, so it'll live with the episode. And just as an aside, I'll tell you my history as a filmmaker. It's true that I wrote produce and directed many things, work with a lot of big stars, but my passion really early in my career was making documentary films and reality based type programming. And that's why I am good at this interviewing and working with others because of my history of doing that for 10 years, making several documentary films. Oh, that's wonderful. So while I've got you here, then we made a documentary about a silly playwright showing up on an island and becoming a clam farmer. It just won the International Ocean Film Festival. We won the Paris Short Film Festival. It's called Rise of the Clam Ambassador. It's like ambassador, but it's got clam in the front rise of the clam ambassador. Check it out, and you'll see a magical look, really a cinematic look at our island, at our industry, at my goofy ass trying to learn, where is that? Where can I find it? You can just Google it. It's free on Vimeo right now. It's made the festival circuit, and now we've got it out there for free Rise of the Clam ba. I'd love for you to get a real visual look at our life. Yeah, I'm excited. I mean, you're so excited about it, and I want to come and visit you and see the place, but now I'm like, it's all in my mind. I want to go research. It. Yeah, check out. It's an eight minute video, and it's a hysterical story about me and my best buddy, the mayor, and me making all the mistakes and trying to learn how to be a clam farmer. Well, all right, Mike, listen, I'm going to be in touch. Alright. I'll talk to you soon. Thank. Eddie. I appreciate you brother, man. I appreciate you, man. I'll talk with you soon, byebye. Hey, don't go away.