The Making Instinct

Three generations of stories that demanded to be told

Bob was a stuffed brown bear of no particular branding. Fred was an elephant purchased at Disney World when my kids were very young. Together, they became a team.

Every night at bedtime, Bob and Fred would spring to life. They'd walk to the kitchen to raid the refrigerator. They went on quests to rescue the kids when they got lost in the forest. They hitched rides in the family minivan—and later the SUV—tagging along on vacations to new places. The stories were improvised, ridiculous, and completely alive. My kids didn't just hear them. They lived in them.

To this day, my oldest, Eli, keeps both of those stuffed animals—and won't return them to me. I have mixed feelings about that.

But that's the thing about stories told with your hands and your voice in a dark room at bedtime. They become real to the people who hear them. The objects carry the weight of the worlds you built. Bob and Fred aren't stuffed animals anymore. They're artifacts of a mythology that only four people in the world fully remember.

The Making

I've been a technologist for over thirty years. That's my career and I love it. I have been blessed to work at one place for almost 25 years. But somewhere along the way I discovered that what I actually am—underneath the job titles and the daily work—is a maker.

It started with things I could touch. Woodworking, which I got from my dad who built because he enjoyed it and partially out of necessity to provide for the family, fix things, and along the way he learned he loved making. Pottery and clay. Mixing materials—metal, wood, glass, granite—just to see what happened when they met. Painting. Sketching. The medium never mattered as much as the act. There was something in the making itself that fed me. Some of my favorite creations are native American art inspired wooden tower lamps that sit in my office and living room.

Code turned out to be the same thing. Building software scratched the same itch as building a table—you start with nothing, you shape it, and at the end something exists that didn't before.

And then came stories.

Where It Came From

My dad didn't tell me bedtime stories—not like Bob and Fred. But when my three younger sisters were growing up, something in him unlocked. He started what he called "Pack-o-lies"—wild, improvised tales told at bedtime. Trolls under bridges. Giant birds. Monsters and dragons conjured from nothing but his voice and whatever his imagination handed him that night.

I watched that from the sidelines, a bit too old to be the audience but not too old to notice what was happening. A man making something from nothing because the drive was in him and it had to come out and the people he wanted to share it with were the ones he loved most.

From Bedtime to Bookshelf

The stuffed animal stories didn't stay at bedtime. They couldn't. The worlds kept growing roots.

One of those roots became StuffedYarnz—a world where real animals become stuffed when they eat human food or are touched by human children. Bob and Fred weren't part of StuffedYarnz, but they were the soil it grew from. The impulse was the same: what if these things were alive? What if they had a story?

StuffedYarnz sounds whimsical, and it is, but underneath I was building something with real weight. The world is modern and deteriorating—pollution, overfishing, ecosystems collapsing. An ornery orange octopus hatches a plan to sink the coastlines and protect ocean life and he works with a wise old turtle named Grandma Mae, who was modeled after my own grandmother, to organize sea creatures for the cause. That's the story on the surface.

But underneath, there's a bigger plan—the Creator mending the gap between humans and animals by letting animals become stuffed, fall in love with human kids, and find a new way forward together. And that same ornery octopus, the one who wanted to drown the human world, eventually forms a new plan: rescuing drowning people, saving sinking ships, building the very bridge to mankind he once wanted to destroy.

That's a redemption arc. That's theology wearing a children's story as a disguise. And it grew out of stuffed animals on a bedsheet.

The Thread That Doesn't Break

Here's what I didn't fully understand until recently: this isn't just my story. It's generational.

My dad made up Pack-o-lies with nothing but his voice. I took bedtime stories and turned them into published books, built fictional worlds, developed entire educational frameworks around them. And then I watched my three kids each find their own version of the same drive.

My oldest writes professionally for a non-profit think tank—persuasive, structured, purposeful writing that moves people toward action. Different from fiction, but the same instinct: shape words until they do something in the world.

My middle child writes poetry and has written volumes of fan fiction—which is its own form of world-building, taking someone else's universe and finding new rooms in it that the original creator never saw. She writes because she has to. I recognize the feeling.

My youngest has a poetry book about to be published and is working on a book about POTS, a condition she lives with daily. That's storytelling as witness—taking a lived experience that most people don't understand and turning it into something they can. She has a story that needs to exist in the world, and she's building the bridge to share it.

Three generations. Not one of us does the same thing. All of us do the same thing.

Nobody assigned us our genres. Nobody taught any of us to want this. My dad wasn't instructed to make up monster stories. I wasn't told to turn stuffed animals into a redemption mythology. My kids weren't given their forms. The drive found its own outlet in each of us, shaped by who we are and what was available to us.

The Cat Who Hated

My latest series is The Cat Who Hated, and it's reached a kind of maturity that feels different from my earlier work. I won't pitch it here—that's not what this post is for. But I want to share what it feels like to be inside a story that has grown up.

There's a moment in any long project where the characters stop being yours and start being themselves. You know their voice so well that you can feel when a line is wrong—not grammatically wrong, emotionally wrong. They wouldn't say that. They wouldn't do that. And you find yourself in service to them rather than in control of them. That's when the work gets good.

I use modern tools to help me write. AI for ideation, for iteration, for adversarial review, for pushing my thinking into places I wouldn't have gone alone. But the reason I write—the energy, the invigoration, the thing that makes me want to keep going—has nothing to do with the tools. It's the same thing my dad had sitting on the edge of that bed. The same thing my daughter has writing about her body's betrayals. The same thing my son has crafting arguments that might change policy.

We make because we are makers. The tools evolve. The drive doesn't.

No End in Sight

I don't feel an end to this. If anything, the appetite is growing. Every new story sparks a world. Every world demands characters. Every character eventually grabs me by the collar and won't let go until their truth is told. My current project involves Leonardo Da Vinci and dragons and I have a book about one-eyed duck pirates that is itching to be written.

I've built software, furniture, pottery, paintings, and stories. I've written children's books, thought leadership for executives, educational curricula, and young adult fiction. I've told bedtime tales with stuffed animals in my hands and published books with AI in my toolkit. The materials keep changing. The making hasn't stopped once.

My dad gave me something he didn't even know he was giving. Not the stories themselves—I was too old for those. He gave me the sight of a man making something from nothing because he couldn't help it. Because the drive was in him and it had to come out.

It's in all of us. Some of us just can't stop answering it.