Last Erfworld Book 2 Epilogue update

The final Erfworld epilogue update featuring my voice. I'm all choked up, sigh. Extra special video effects in this one -- and expect to see more from me in the Erfworld universe soon! 

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/12/epilogue-25-parson-and-charlie/

My episode of Jeopardy!

BREAKING NEWS (okay, not really, just been too lazy/busy to post till now):

My episode of JEOPARDY! airs on Tuesday, Jan. 28th, at 7:00 or 7:30 depending on your local syndication time. (Here in Cleveland it's on channel 19, WOIO CBS, 7:30 pm.)

Mark your calendars! Prepare to thrill at the game's daring twists and turns! Either root for Arthur to attain the spoils of victory or sadistically revel in the humiliation of his defeat! C'mon, it's only a half-hour, and I'll be on national TV. Please watch. You can find your local Jeopardy station and air time here:

http://www.jeopardy.com/showguide/whentowatch/

Thanksgiving

Sorry for the lack of updates, to all two of you who read this blog. I've been waiting vainly for life to "calm down" as people keep assuring me it eventually will -- maybe 2015 will be a better year for finding moments for calm reflection amid the chaos, assuming I can use the rest of 2014 to get a head start on said chaos by pulling one long continuous all-nighter from now until December 31.

But it's good to remember that there's a ton to be thankful for, most of all that my sister is in town and about to join my wife and my in-laws and me for an incredible meal of way too much food. Also that none of us is in prison or homeless and that we're privileged enough to join in the big victory party of white Europeans vs. everyone they stole their land from without having to be white Europeans ourselves. (Huzzah!)

As far as the Arthur's Awesome Attempt to Kickstart His Media Career side goes, there's plenty to be thankful for there too. First there's the awesome indie film Cleanland that I was honored enough to have a small part in, for which there's a new trailer:

I have always wanted to be in a movie trailer where one of the beats is my horrified face staring directly into the camera, and now I can die happy.

We're also close to wrapping up the Erfworld.com epilogue videos that I've been voicing the narration for, and despite the many late nights I can't be happier with the experience it's been narrating such a weird, offbeat, creative Web series. I know it's almost impossible to follow if you haven't been reading it from the beginning -- but that's just a reason to go back to the beginning and binge-read it now, before things get Really Serious in the climactic chapter to come.

Here's me channeling two of Erfworld's most badassly eloquent characters in the second-to-last of these Erfworld videos:

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/11/epilogue-24-tramennis-and-charlie/

And finally, any Clevelanders who aren't still in a food coma or trampled to death in a Wal-Mart should make Black Friday plans to see me once again go for the gold at the Cleveland Monologue Battle. It's their one-year anniversary, it's an awesome event and I hope to still be performing there at their two-year anniversary. Happy Turkey Day, and see you at Epic Lounge tomorrow!

https://www.facebook.com/events/1418731305011304/

No stand-up from Arthur tomorrow night; Erfworld update, though

Life's been crazy lately, but I've still been remiss in not posting this latest Erfworld update with my vocal stylings as warlord Parson Gotti and his not-so-loyal-recently minion Sizemore:

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/11/epilogue-23-parson-and-sizemore/

Sadly, part of the craziness means that I won't be able to attend the Slim & Jumbo's event tomorrow that I recently advertised here. Apologies to all... one of you that read this and were planning to go. I'll keep you all posted on what's going on in Arthurworld.

Ahoy Clevelanders who will be here in November to welcome me back from my Jeopardy adventure...

So, for everyone who enjoys seeing me be hilarious onstage (hopefully intentionally, sometimes tragically unintentionally) here's another opportunity for you: I'm going to be in the bustling metropolis of Garrettsville, OH at a benefit comedy competition.

The competition is partially based on audience response, so I need all the friendly faces I can get. Pencil it in for 7:00 pm Nov. 16th at Slim &Jumbo's, 8101 Main St. in Garrettsville if you can!

Note: This will be directly after the emotional whirlwind I'm sure my Jeopardy experience will be, so I will either be incredibly elated or deeply dejected and either way have to deliberately suppress all outward signs of that emotion to avoid breaking my Jeopardy NDA. Which will be interesting.

Before I completely disappear down the Jeopardy! preparation rabbit hole, here's another recent Erfworld ep I voiced that gets a little darker and more emotional than most:

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/10/epilogue-20-jillian-and-ansom/

And here's one that just posted, containing a major dun-dun-DUNNH! moment:

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/11/epilogue-21-vinny/

A future in Jeopardy

So, as I may have told some or all of you, I've been called to be a contestant on an upcoming episode of Jeopardy!, and my brainpower and time since then has been pretty much all taken up with trying to fill every spare nook and cranny of my brain's synapses with quiz show trivia.

(If you knew how much of it was already composed purely of quiz show trivia beforehand, this should impress and disturb you.)

Apologies to everyone to whom I promised regular updates about the voiceover and performance world, but it's rare that you get the chance to do a half-hour performance that might net you well over $10,000. (Well, rare for me. I'm sure Jennifer Hale is used to it.)

A quick update on what my life has been like: I have obsessively scoured Wikipedia and created complete sets of flashcards on the following topics:

US Presidents, Vice Presidents, losers in presidential elections
The 50 US states, their capitals, their borders and their nicknames
Canada -- provinces, capitals and recent PMs
A list of significant Popes
The British monarchy
Major American wars -- leaders and battles
Seas of the world

Things I have not yet covered but intend to:

Classical musicians of the past 300 years
Popular musicians of the past 70 years (Billboard's #1 hits)
Oscar winners, Best Actor and Best Picture
English-language poets and novelists of the past 300 years
The dreaded opera category
Potent Potables (cocktail recipes)
Mountain ranges and tallest mountains of the world
Rivers and lakes of the world
Archipelagoes and islands of the world
Waterfalls
Nobel Prize winners and their biographies
The periodic table of elements
Major Linnaean categories of living organisms

This is based on research of what categories come up more often in Jeopardy than others, as well as some self-analysis of what I could stand to know more about. I've also been practicing the game theory of Final Jeopardy wagering and standing in front of a monitor playing YouTube videos of Jeopardy games clicking a pen like it's a buzzer.

This has not been good for my health or my relationships, but hopefully it will be all worth it to come within a hairsbreadth of winning, blow the Final Jeopardy question and come home humiliated with $1,000 and a renewed incentive to stop wasting time on Wikipedia and watching game shows and focus on my voiceover career instead.

In the meantime, here's a video from 2012 of me voicing a promo for sous-vide cooking:

Erfworld updates

Listen to me wax poetic in Erfworld update #18:

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/10/4786/

And hear me do my best impression of beloved character actor Ted Levine in Erfworld update #19:

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/10/epilogue-19-caesar-and-bill/

More Erfworld: The plot thickens

I am just as curious to find out who the lady with the hair curlers is as everyone else:

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/10/epilogue-15-%E2%80%93-parson-and-the-great-minds-2/

I may post something serious about the ups and downs of being a non-white person trying to break into showbiz later on (probably not, it's not actually a very fun or interesting topic) but for now let's just say I play this song in my head any time someone talks about Asians being a "model minority":

Audition videos!

So I'm going to start putting up vids of my auditions, performances and so on as much as I can, both for shameless self-promotion purposes and in order to hold myself accountable -- "It was just an audition, no one will ever see it after today" is the lazy actor's go-to excuse for not bringing their A-game.

It looks likely that I didn't get cast for the role since I haven't heard back yet, but here's some video auditions I did at home, filmed on my wife's iPhone -- sorry, but they wanted the audition turned around within a single evening. It's for an upcoming film THE EXURBS, which looks like an awesome film that you should check out whether or not I'm in it:

Update: The Sparx City Hop, the Monologue Battle, and "Handle With Care" at Actors' Summit

I had an amazing time this weekend as a tour guide for the Sparx City Hop in Cleveland. It feels like it's been ages since I made a living sitting in a rumbling trolley bus spouting off into a mic about local landmarks to a bunch of tourists, but it's amazing how it all came rushing back.

DC is easier to tell stories about than Cleveland -- if nothing else when you're in a traffic jam you can fall back on American history in general and tell stories about various presidents and whatnot -- but I really did learn how much there was to know that I didn't know about Cleveland's history preparing for this event, including how much of Cleveland's storied history has been determined by massive rioting. (If you want to know the history of Cleveland's East Side vs. West Side rivalry, check out the story of the Battle of the Bridge.)

I had a lot of fun hanging out with native Clevelanders and visitors to our fair city swapping stories, and I definitely recommend the Sparx City Hop for anyone in Cleveland next year. The Downtown Alliance pays to have touring hop-on-hop-off trolleys completely for free -- which is a better deal than you'll find in DC -- and the only downside of my being a tour guide this year was I didn't have much time to ride myself and take in all the art exhibits, musical performances and cheap beer around that day.

In further news, I'm going to be performing once again at the Epic Lounge at the monthly Monologue Battle. Major props to my friend Cristal Christian for continuing to work hard putting on this event every month. I won the first time I went and have had to yield to the increased competition since then -- but I'm hoping to step up my game this month and reclaim my crown.

Thursday night September 26 at 6:00 pm at 17322 Harvard Ave. in Cleveland. Hope to see you all there!

And finally, more details to come as the event approaches, but I'm excited to announce that I've been cast in the lead role in an upcoming production at Actors' Summit, a romantic comedy entitled HANDLE WITH CARE. (I get to be the comic third wheel in the "meet cute", just like John Candy in Splash.) The show doesn't go up until the spring, so watch this space for more info.

Thanks and much love to all my friends and supporters, and hope to see you at a show soon.

Another Erfworld update

My British accent gets another workout in this one: Maggie and the Great Minds

Also, Erfworld!

I get to do some really fun voices in these bits. I finally get to try to fill the enormous boots of the imposing and tyrannical Lord Stanley the Tool: http://www.erfworld.com/2013/09/epilogue-10-message-to-the-tool/ And I get to do my best attempt at a brief Alan Alda impression, as well as yet another attempt at being a sexy lady: http://www.erfworld.com/2013/09/epilogue-11-lilith-and-pierce/ I won't tire of doing these as long as Rob keeps writing them, and I'm really excited to see what finally happens when Parson directly confronts the Great Minds. Stay tuned!

So here's what I've been up to

Sorry to leave you all hanging (well... as far as I can tell, all two dozen-odd or so of you, but I have big hopes for this blog's audience growing in the future).

I've been spending a couple weeks struggling with mild illness and an enormous amount of work, both day-job-related and personal-business-related, but I haven't forgotten you, gentle readers.

In fact, here, have a present, a Vine I did as an audition for a social-media-based ad campaign by Vice.com, on the topic "What does it feel like to be in love?":



The projects that have taken up my time since waving farewell to the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival are diverse, but the biggest one was being part of the diversity presentation at John Carroll University's freshman orientation.

That was a trip for me. I still remember guiltily feeling bored at the diversity presentation at my OWN freshman orientation. The fact that now more than a decade separates me and this year's incoming college freshman class fills me with dread of my own mortality and the relentless march of time, as well as giving me the urge to acquire some kind of facial piercing.

The hardest thing about it was that I was playing multiple characters -- a professor who had immigrated from China, and a Chinese international student -- where it was integral to their character that they spoke in a thick Chinese accent.

Admittedly this isn't the first time I've been called on to do it, and it is an accent I grew up on my whole life, so it wasn't totally nerve-racking for me. But, as I said in the Q&A we had after the show, when you've spent your whole life trying to sound as "normal" and "American" as possible, intentionally putting on a "broken English" accent is triggering in all sorts of ways, and it's a delicate tightrope doing so in a way that's sensitive to the character while also reflecting the reality of that character's struggle to communicate.

Perhaps the biggest thing that freaked me out about playing those characters was my wife telling me I ended up sounding just like my dad. Unsurprising, considering who my model for the accent was, but still... I'm not sure I'm ready for people to be saying that to me yet.

In any case the experience would not have been anywhere near as rewarding as it was if not for our director, Michael Oatman, a consummate professional capable of breaking down a scene moment-by-moment at the same time as regaling us with heartwarming stories about growing up amid gang violence and hate crimes in East Cleveland. I learned a lot and I hope to work with him again.

Now for my next project -- I'm in front of a camera! I've been cast in MAD Vista Productions' indie feature film Cleanland.

Sort of the exact opposite of doing an uplifting and optimistic piece about racial healing, Cleanland is a gritty look at corruption, chaos and criminality. My mother was always afraid of me being brutally murdered on the streets of Cleveland -- now she'll finally get to see it happen!

You can sign up for updates about the project at the MAD Vista Productions website:

http://madvista.com/

as well as read their maddeningly terse synopsis of the plot of Cleanland.

I've signed an NDA so the details are still hush-hush. Let's just say I'm planning to re-watch Frank Miller's Sin City soon as research for my (minor, but badass) role.

And that's it for now. Though I continue to remain, as always, overcaffeinated, underslept and always auditioning. Keep in touch about opportunities coming down the pike, gentle readers, and I'll do the same for all of you.

Back to blogging -- My involvement in The Book of Voices project

I've been completely wiped since my vacation in Maine, trying to keep up with the flood tide of work that had been piling up while I was gone. I did promise my loyal readers (however many of you actually exist out there) more updates about what I've been up to, though, so here's a project that's just getting off the ground that I'm pretty excited about.

Meet Joseph Zitt, scholar, geek, leader in the Occupy Cleveland community and all around cool Cleveland citizen. One of Joe's interests is also one of mine: This beautiful, complex, frustrating compendium of law, philosophy, history and poetry we call the Holy Bible and the history and context as it's been viewed through the ages.

One of his many awesome projects has been tackling the process of writing what ended up being a pretty long novel in the form of serialized microfictions, The Book of Voices. You can read an early version of the book on a Wordpress blog here. It's essentially theological fanfiction, a Midrash for the modern age -- giving voice to the unheard characters in the background of familiar Hebrew School/Sunday School stories, exploring holy text with an eye for the postmodern and subversive while always remaining respectful to the weight of the subject matter.

It's really fun stuff, in other words, and I was a fan of it as soon as I heard about it. Of course, my own voice being cast in the pilot episodes to turn it into an audiobook series didn't hurt.

You can listen to me playing the roles of Adam, the First Man, and his suspiciously similar-sounding great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson Japheth, youngest son of Noah and patriarch of the nations, here:

https://archive.org/details/BoV01ElishevaAndAdam

These are rough "pilot" pieces, as Joseph notes, intended to serve as a prototype with which to start putting together a more professionally made series of podcasts, but I still really like how they turned out and think they provide a great sense of what the book is like and what my vocal range is like.

And yes, in both the pieces I'm in I play a distraught mortal man commiserating in the wake of a great disaster with an angel played by the inestimable Robert Branch. I think it's a dynamic that suits my "earthy" quality as an actor, especially alongside Rob's natural ethereality.

Do leave me a note if you're in the Cleveland area and want to know more about/be more involved in this evolving project.

Another Erfworld update

I won't lie, the Erfworld update schedule can be kind of draining, but it's rewarding too.

The character of Jack Snipe was one of my favorites in the comic, and it's been a lot of fun voicing him. That alone makes this a great update, leaving aside the MASSIVE PLOT REVELATION.

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/08/book-2-%E2%80%93-epilogue-07-%E2%80%93-jack-in-black/

(For those of you who don't read Erfworld: There are massive spoilers here. Go ahead and binge-read the whole series before watching the most recent video. I'll wait.)

One last update before bed

A new Erfworld episode is up! This is one of my favorites of what I've done so far -- a chance to play with some subtle emotional beats.

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/08/book-2-%E2%80%93-epilogue-06-%E2%80%93-parson-and-maggie-discuss-matters/

Also, more Erfworld

If you care about Erfworld, be warned, there are some pretty major and exciting plot bombs being dropped in these coming updates.

If you don't care about Erfworld, I do a lot of funny voices in these updates.

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/08/book-2-%E2%80%93-epilogue-03-%E2%80%93-ace-on-the-move/

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/08/book-2-%E2%80%93-epilogue-04-%E2%80%93-thinkamancers-poll/

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/08/book-2-%E2%80%93-epilogue-05-%E2%80%93-at-the-temple/

Back from Maine

I think I've become the kind of person who spends the whole time before a vacation stressing out about how much I need a vacation and then spends the whole vacation stressing out about how much work I should be getting done.

Sigh.

Anyway, I've got two big local performance projects on my plate right now. I'm currently cast in a multicultural awareness play for the freshman orientation at John Carroll University, which goes up this Friday and for which we have been feverishly rehearsing (with the wrinkle that my vacation threw a week-long absence in the middle of an already tight rehearsal schedule).

Shocker of shockers, I play the Asian guy.

I'd have invited everyone I know to come see it but I think it's 1) only for incoming freshmen at John Carroll who need to be educated about diversity issues on campus, and 2) of limited interest to anyone who isn't an incoming freshman at John Carroll who needs to be educated about diversity issues on campus.

In all seriousness, a lot of the situations in this play -- like white students throwing a hipster-ironic "ghetto party" where everyone dressed up as black stereotypes -- actually happened at JCU, and it's kind of depressing and frustrating that stuff as basic as "This kind of thing = BAD" still needs to be made the focus of huge educational initiatives, but that's the world we live in.

In other and more exciting news, I've been cast as a gang member who dies in a Cleveland indie film. I don't think I can give much more info than that due to the impressively scary NDA I had to sign to be part of this project, but suffice it to say I am extremely excited to finally die horribly and messily on the mean streets of Cleveland -- a dream I have had since I moved here (almost every  night, in fact).

I swear I will be posting more stuff (or, as we say in the small business world, "generating quality content to foster and maintain engagement") as soon as I get some breathing room. Look forward to: My audio work on the "Book of Voices" audiobook project, some blasts from the past with commercial narrations I did that got on YouTube, some new monologues I've been working on and my entry in Vice.com's Vine contest.

My Cleveland stand-up debut

Cleveland has long been an incubator for stand-up comics -- a species that thrives on self-loathing, alcohol, strip clubs and hipster irony, all of which can be found in abundance in this city -- and stand-up comedy is the latest of the many things I've chosen to try to break into.

I had been doing improv comedy for a good long while in DC prior to this, and while I will always love improv the strict instructions never to "pre-plan" jokes began to grate on me after a while, since nary a week goes by when I haven't developed a backlog of pre-planned jokes I'm aching to deploy at one inappropriate venue or another.

So I resolved when I came to Cleveland to take that step into the unknown, flying solo with only a script to guide me.

What I learned was that going out there with a script and no teammates is way, way scarier than going out there with teammates and no script. I could spin this into a moral about the Power of Friendship, but it's really just because if you have teammates then if you bomb it's not actually 100% your fault.

In any case, after I finished an excellent workshop with the excellent Dave Schwensen, I took a video of my prototype standup set to share with you all. I've been performing fairly regularly since then and fine-tuning things, but the basic setup of my routine focuses on the things most familiar to me: Voiceover work, overwhelming intellectual arrogance, and cancer jokes. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFzHx_j2V00
Let me know what you think!

Coming Soon: YouTube Adventures

My YouTube channel has been little more than a dumping ground for various privately-posted abortive projects in the past, and the occasional video audition for a reality TV show (I haven't given up on you yet, King of the Nerds!), but I'm planning to do more with it as soon as I get back from recharging my batteries on vacation.

Obviously being on-camera is not the most natural thing for me -- having been told by several people who thought they were hilariously creative and witty that I have a great face for radio -- but videos tend to be more fun and easier to click on than SoundCloud audio files, and if I can gallivant around outdoors wearing this:

Then I can survive pretty much anything.

In any case, watch this space for more to come:

https://www.youtube.com/user/arctan180

Announcement: ERFWORLD

I've played this announcement very coy up till now, and actually meant to make the big post this morning, but my day job wouldn't leave me alone. (Sigh, stupid day job, I don't know why I do it. Oh yeah, money and health insurance.)

Anyway, those of you who know me may remember that a while ago I started bugging everyone about a Kickstarter campaign to fund a set of motion comics and animations at erfworld.com.

--

A brief digression on what the heck Erfworld is:

I'm a huge geek, like some of you may also be, and as a demon-worshiping pimple-popping glasses-adjusting virginal young Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast, I was very much into Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick.

It was a comic about gaming that made gaming jokes and yet, over time, turned into a real story about characters with depth that made you remember how great and thought-provoking D&D could be when you weren't just munching Cheetos and slaying kobolds. What else could you ask for? (And it was written by the guy who took second place to Eberron in Wizards of the Coast's "Design a D&D Setting" competition, but that's another digression.)

I, like tens of thousands of other Order of the Stick fans, was surprised and bemused to see Rich Burlew have a guest comic at the end of 2006. This weirdly cutesy, surreal "Erfworld" certainly wasn't about D&D but about some kind of homebrew old-school miniatures game on a hex map, packed chock-full of lame puns, esoteric Internet meme references and characters who took themselves very seriously despite being modeled on the proportion of Polly Pocket dolls.

Like most Order of the Stick fans, I was confused, then dismissive, then absolutely hooked.

Erfworld has progressed from that day forward to becoming an impressive soap opera, philosophical meditation on the nature of war and absolutely crazy gonzo work of detailed on-the-fly worldbuilding all in one. It's undergone several format changes and been through some rocky times with artists being replaced and updates being put on hiatus, but I've joined the legion of fans who've stuck with it through all the troubles.

And, seriously, this story about "dwagons" and "twolls" and "Lord Stanley the Tool" made it to one of Time Magazine's Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2007.

...And then Rob Balder, the author, put out a casting call for voiceover artists to help further the multimedia-ification of Erfworld.

You know what I had to do.

--

Fast-forward to today, and I'm incredibly honored to be the voice of the Epilogue chapters to Erfworld Book 2, presented in the format of illustrated text-with-audio.

The characters of Erfworld and the setting of Erfworld are incredibly fun to inhabit behind the mic. It's been a blast working with Rob so far and I hope to continue doing so for a long time.

For those of you who glazed over during all the geeky crap up there, trust me, go to erfworld.com, start with Book 1 and get in on the craze. You won't regret it -- indeed, the only thing you will regret is that you have to make it all the way to the end of Book 2 before you get to hear my mellifluous voice.

For those of you for whom "hex-based miniatures" sounds like some kind of unpleasant disease -- especially those of you who miraculously might be reading this because you're an Important Showbiz Person looking to Sample the Quality of My Work -- let me just say this is some of the more rewarding character work I've ever done, and I truly hope that I've managed to convey pathos, human drama and depth in a narrative littered with cutesy twee nonsense (which is what those of us who love Erfworld have always loved about it).

Without further ado, permalinks to the first two episodes of the Erfworld epilogues:

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/08/book-2-epilogue-01-artemis-decrypted/

http://www.erfworld.com/2013/08/book-2-%E2%80%93-epilogue-02-%E2%80%93-jack-decrypted/

Stay tuned, more to come!

What the hell, gamers

A lot of the pieces of living human excrement who have hounded Jennifer Hepler off the Internet and out of her job have as the cornerstone of their complaints that video games are an inappropriate place for her sexual fantasies.

To all the angry straight men defending video games from inappropriate sexual fantasies, I have to say:

ARE
YOU
FREAKING
KIDDING
ME
SERIOUSLY
I
DON'T
EVEN

Cleveland Rocks

For those of you who know me already, you probably know it's been a long-standing item of contention between me and my lovely wife where we should live. As a native to Northeast Ohio, her vote has always and forever been for Cleveland, whereas as a non-native to Northeast Ohio my vote has always been for Anywhere But Cleveland.

(Who can blame me? It's a city that inspires its own residents to create things like this.)

Eventually, after many months of discussing, bickering, kicking and screaming she finally convinced me, Mr. Bi-Coastal Snob, to pursue relocation to her beloved Midwest. The primary bargaining chip in this negotiation was her quitting the lucrative government job that had been holding us in the DC area, thus leaving us with no actual rational reason to stay there.

The snarky side of me wants to complain about the lack of free museums, lack of political figures of national significance, lack of Ethiopian restaurants and lack of gigantic marble obelisk landmarks in this city, but here's a brief rundown of what's actually happened for me since we moved to Cleveland:

• I got a great day job with great benefits
• I got signed with a talent agency, the Talent Group
• I got cast in the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival
• In general, I've been winning or placing in competitions, making it to callbacks or booking on auditions, and just generally kicking butt way more than I had in DC

Why is this? Well, obviously the pat explanation is that Cleveland is a smaller pond than DC -- and certainly smaller than LA, where I was based before my wife and I got together. Another explanation might be that I have, in fact, consistently grown and matured as an actor in all the time that it felt like I was struggling uphill trying to make inroads in voiceover and in stage acting during my time on the East Coast. And it's true the combination of reaching a new plateau skill-wise while jumping into a smaller pond can feel like a breakthrough.

But in a lot of ways, despite everything I loved about DC, I was in a rut there, and a change of physical scenery can often be enough to break a lot of the mental and emotional habits that hold us back from taking the chances we need to take.

I never thought I'd say it but I do like a lot of things about Cleveland over DC -- I like the nonexistence of the Beltway, the lack of seething crowds of tourists, and the fact that I rarely if ever meet anyone who actually goes to a bar or restaurant after work still wearing a freaking tie and plastic ID badge in order to assert their social status.

But mainly I simply like that it's different, and that by being different it's allowed me space to be different -- to look at all the things I was doing and the limitations on myself I was unconsciously accepting beforehand and seriously ask myself what about myself I wanted to change.

And for that opportunity, I will always be grateful, even if the city does smell kind of funny.

My triumphal return to blogging

Greetings, everyone!

Some of you may know me from college, or from past jobs, or from random Internet kerfluffles. Some of you may have been specifically invited to start reading this blog. Some of you may have stumbled upon this randomly and have no idea who I am.

That's fine. Welcome!

I'm a Renaissance man, insomniac and all around weird guy. Most of you who know me know that already.

Since I was a wee lad my obsession has been with acting and performance, whether it involved improvising cruel impressions of teachers on the school bus or giving heartfelt line readings of Macbeth in English class or hijacking the school announcements to insert my controversial political opinions.

As I got older and I successfully passed through puberty and learned to fake some measure of social maturity, I learned to find other outlets for my attention-seeking urges. Improv, stand-up, acting in Shakespeare productions...

But the one gift that always outshone the others was my voice. After enough people had paid me the backhanded compliment of telling me that my deep, rich, baritone voice sounds "absolutely nothing like the way I look", I decided to stop narrating my own internal monologue for free and start narrating other people's written monologues for money.

After all, it's just voiceover. How hard could it be?

Many years later, many lessons later and many sleepless frenzied nights in front of the mic in my home studio whispering "Why does it still not sound right?!" later, I've started booking jobs regularly, I've made a decent amount of money and I'm ready to come out of the closet to you all as Arthur Chu, VO Pro With A Blog.

Everything I've read about networking, social media marketing, creating customer engagement, developing a brand identity, etc. mostly boils down to the fact that however it is you do it, you have to do it by actually talking to people and not sitting at home playing video games, so this blog is my first public step into the world of letting people know who I am and what I do.

And it's already pretty late, so I'll leave you for now with an admonition:

Watch this space. There is more to come.