Here in 2024 rolls into today, I have to remember that I’ve now been seriously focus on my writing style for over twenty years. I have had a focus working with young people and their writing for the last 15-years, worked with community organizations writing for twelve years, and I have worked with a pretty good writers’ group for 8-years. During the time of my retirement in January of 2002, I realize that time has literally flown by. I can’t help thinking about all of what I been doing can’t help but make me a better and more experienced writer and artistic creator. A lot! Yeah, it means a lot to me and I support AAWA by not only attending meetings that I travel 50-miles to attend. AAWA means enough to me that I am willing to dedicate time outside of the monthly AAWA meetings to work toward even greater success for the Black Writers that the organization seeks to raise up and include in its collective.

Added to the fact, that all these involvements aide me in getting the word out on my own writings and creative endeavors. Not just the wonderful reading opportunities but in working with other comrades in compositions. Other writer comrades support my various writings in many ways. My compositions are on items of historical Blackness in America, wonderful nature, spiritual, and people experiences as well as the merging of technology in human relations. I also do a little sci-fi, and lots of political pontification about the world all around me and my efforts as a playwright.

Over the last few years, I’ve had the chance to grow my skills in composition from my active oration that captures my spoken words “hands-free” to add into editable texts. This method of composition has help to really expedite my written expressions and creative thoughts, almost anywhere and anytime. I just talk into my phone! The resulting outcome is a first draft of my composition in an editable word-processing file I can use to refine the same.

As I look at what I want to do in 202t and beyond, I envision more involvement in integration of technologies with my creative writing. There are 3-areas that I have been magnetizing my interest towards over the last few years:

• Working with text to speech reassignment to create a synthesized product for my readings and plays. I want to continue and grow in the use these artificial intelligences (AI) to help me create the tone, pitch, inflection and some of the emotion in the voices that literally “speak my words!”
• I look to continue with computer graphic enhancements to help animate my stories and highlight places or scenes in my plays. I look to increase and refine such AI graphics to the transition and possible megaphoning of a new creative crafter.
• Use of streaming technologies to connect more often with writers and the reader communities that I seek to collaborate with over the cyberspace for our creative endeavors. I call it “streaming collaborative creativity.”

Now, all that planned stuff and impacted positively with the band width of our collaborators and our cyberspace connections. I look to gather greater resources for my virtual creations. I know that the new normal was only aided from quarantining as humans are unbelievably tied to technology. Also,  noted, everybody is at home and everybody is streaming, Netflix movies, Amazon purchases, ZOOM doctor visits, ultimate gaming, and casual web surfing, everybody streaming something. My plans will have to adjust.

A big highlight for me in prior years, was to see my own creative words twisted out of my memory and come to life in the Mahogany Project’s presentation of “We Still Out Here,” a 6-Play Festival series featuring Black Playwrights. My own play, the “Disneyland Bus,” was received well and is still streaming (https://www.weouthereseattle.com/on-demand). Now, I am looking to work on more techno-compositions with more creations in collaboration with other creative artists and producers. I want to look at a redo of my “artist” website and push forward with the new sci-fi manuscripts that I am working on. I also look to be very much involved with production oriented groups and the future enhancements of my body of work. It may be the only way to get I can get to my writer’s freedom.