A dream is a wish your heart makes and sometimes you also get paid to do it. For the past few months, I’ve been working on a new animated Disney movie. I’ll just leave it at that, because the NDA was government level, I might be a spy now, Mickey might now own Bobbie and Joe, and / or my soul. Let’s just say it is a movie with REDACTED characters, and REDACTED plot. I’ve been working in TV for about 12 years now and I confess that some of it feels old hat, all of the pitching and circling back, and I didn’t realize how badly I needed to learn something new. In animation, the writer works really closely with the story artists, they’re writers in their own way. The visual language of the movie is just as important as the characters’ emotional journeys so they’re in their from the beginning, pitching and crafting and live-drawing ideas as they’re formed. By the time it’s on your Apple TV so you can play it for your kid while you zoom, each movie has taken hundreds of hours and ARTISTS, artists who listen, and watch, and draw. I watched them draw in full awe, in fuller Dork, because it’d been a long time (too long?) since I’d just watched an artist do their art. As a writer I wouldn’t call myself an artist unless I’m filling out a weird tax form. But in conversation with a visual artist, I see how I am one. I have to pivot back over to TV now, but on my last day, the artists drew me. I realized it was happening and then I begged for them all to keep going, trying to keep my face still while shouting it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. The results are something I’ll treasure FOREVER, if not make into stationery, or perhaps my first tattoos.