Get Lost on Purpose.
Sometimes, you have to blaze a new trail.
Lost. Lonely. Quiet.
There’s a specific kind of silence in the part of the forest where nobody has yet tread. One where the noise of familiarity and the every-day is too far to interfere with what’s surrounding you.
No footprints. No trail markers. No helpful little signs telling you the scenic overlook is half a mile ahead. It’s serene, and there’s an unfiltered beauty to it. Look around and it feels … foreign, yet familiar. Loaded with possibilities and mystery. Every glint of light shines on something unexpected and in a new combination to your eyes. Every whiff of the breeze carries new, raw, earthy scent and texture.
Sure, you’ve seen trees before. You’ve seen moss. You’ve seen the mushrooms. But to be one of the first in the version of the scene you’re standing in with no trail forward and no trail back provides a feeling of both reverence and a sprinkle of anxiety or even loneliness.
“Where do I go?”
“What is this place?”
“What do I do here?”
Lost but found.
I live here now, where it’s quiet.
Pull up a stump. I want to let you in on why you shouldn’t be afraid of the silence within a lonely creative lane.
Confidence in Self-Imposed Solitude:
My Alyte Universe is a story told through fiction, music, video, digital, and physical media all at once. When people encounter it, I get some version of the same reaction: this is groundbreaking, this is unique, I have never seen anything shaped like this. David is crazy. (That one’s my favorite)
I’m very humbled and proud to be seen this way, and I’m certainly not shy about sharing it. I am confident. I know what I’ve spent the last 10 months building. I know it’s special, because I am the architect of it.
But I want to tell you the honest reason it’s shaped like this, because there’s something here that will help you and your creative IP. It’s not because I’m a visionary - storytelling is not some new thing. But I am blazing a trail in how I tell stories.
It’s because of my toolbox.
Ikigai. The search for joy in who you are.
Take an inventory of what you know, enjoy, and do.
Author? Musician? Lived in a foreign country? Been in prison? (weird flex, but I won’t judge) Military? Been homeless? (Fun fact: I was, years ago. Couch surfing and sleeping in an abandoned building for a stretch as well. 2/10, would not recommend.)
And go on down the line. What are you knowledgeable in, what is your life experience shaped like? What do you enjoy? Throw it all in a bowl, bake it at 350 degrees for an hour, take it out of the oven and what do you see?
For me, this is the general shape: Writing. Music. Graphic Design. Storytelling. Songwriting, LLM behavioral engineering (which has become a real passion lately), relational database design expert, which is the least romantic job title in this entire paragraph and quietly the most important one.
The Japanese concept here is Ikigai. Taking things you’re good at, things that make you happy, things you can do within your life to flourish, and finding the through-line and connections. Then … find your peaceful clearing, and do the thing.
I’m not the first person to mix a story with music. I’m not the first on the trail to design characters and tell a story with them. I’m not the first to come up with a concept album. But I do find myself in a certain pool of individuals with a rare combination of skills …
Artists who combine music AND visuals AND storytelling AND worldbuilding AND long-form fiction AND a passion for AI behavioral modification AND relational database design mastery.” (and add to this psychology, philosophy, cosmology, legend and lore, technology, futurism and much, much more)*
(*There’s no reddit group for this)
That’s … not a large pool of people, folks. That’s my lonely lane. My peace in the woods. My pause for reflection in a clearing untouched by the footprints of others.
If I just “wrote a book” I’d stay in the most populated space. Same one as everyone else just “writing a book.” But I don’t. I follow every path into the unknown until I’m somewhere unfamiliar and untouched.
That’s what gets me here:
What sets your storytelling apart?
Here’s what’s underlying my IP, and what makes it unique. The lore lives in an actual custom-designed database. Characters, songs, chapters, videos, all cross-referenced, all connected, all queryable. The fiction feeds the music feeds the visuals feeds the digital layer, and the reason those threads never tangle is that one of the hands weaving them spent a quarter century engineering data systems and schema to be so tightly wound and perfect that errors were eliminated due to the boundaries they were forced to exist within.
This is what allows me to have a protagonist that you can talk to. It’s what allows me to connect fiction to music, video, and lore for a 4-dimensional storytelling experience. It’s what allows me to continually add threads and connections to my stories so that no matter which thread you pull on, twice as many will be revealed to you.
The shape of the project is the shape of my toolbox. That’s it. That’s the secret.
An author with my exact stack of skills builds this. An author with a different stack builds something else entirely, something I couldn’t build if I tried.
Which brings me to you.
What’s in your toolbox?
Not the skills you think count. All of it. The nursing degree. The carpentry. The decade of retail that taught you how people actually talk. The years running a D&D table, which is worldbuilding with a live studio audience (and ornery hecklers, usually). Your penchant for puppetry. (Again, no judging.)
You’ve been treating those like they’re irrelevant to your creative work. Like they’re the day job and the art is the escape.
They’re not the day job. They’re the map. The map to the clearing of a lonely peaceful lane that sets you apart from everyone and everything else bringing static to what you’re attempting to do.
The creative world is drowning in cookie-cutter everything because everyone keeps sanding off their weird edges to fit a mold that was already crowded twenty years ago. Same story beats. Same three chords. Same fonts, for the love of God. Same inclination to beg gatekeepers to let you walk on the well-worn path that they’ve now put a toll booth on.
“This is what everyone’s doing! If you want in, pay up.”
And then everyone wonders why nothing feels distinct. Why “nothing is original anymore” is the complaint (usually by people who were enthusiastic about a 10th Spiderman movie, by the way).
Meanwhile the one thing nobody else on Earth has is your exact combination of skills, scars, and strange little competencies. That combination is your creative voice. It didn’t happen by accident. It’s been a box of parts in the garage that you walk past on your way to banging your head against the wall trying to break into industries that actively hate you.
What are you even doing?
So here’s my Sunday question for you …
What do you know how to do that no one else in your lane knows how to do?
Take that thing. Roll it into the work. Let it warp the shape of what you make until what you make couldn’t have come from anyone else. It will feel like getting lost. It will feel like wandering off the path into the part of the forest where there are no footprints.
That’s your serenity. That’s your peace in the lonely clearing. That’s the path you made.
Yes, the Kickstarter for the Alyte Universe is live right now, and it’s doing beautifully, and I’m proud of it in a way I’m still learning to say out loud. It exists because of everything I just told you. It’s the proof, not the pitch.
The takeaway I’m offering isn’t “Back my Kickstarter.” (Though you should!)
The takeaway is: Go get an inventory of yourself.
Then get lost.