In three weeks, I begin a 66-week journey: one chapter of my life’s work released every single week.
Books. Music. Movies. Everything I’ve poured myself into for three decades, laid bare, week after week.
Most of you know me as the founder of Manic-Expression.com. Today I want to introduce myself properly—as a storyteller—and show you exactly why I’ve made this my life’s obsession.
It started on a rainy afternoon in 1985. I was five years old, stuck inside at my grandparents’ house, restless and bored. My grandmother handed me a pad of blue paper to keep me occupied. On the back of a Batman comic, there was a clever ad for the brand-new striped Chips Ahoy cookies—twelve panels showing the colorful stripes slowly melting down the cookies as they baked.
I cut every panel out, pasted them into my blue pad, and wrote a short story about a kid impatiently waiting for his mom to finish baking cookies. That silly little experiment lit the first spark.
Two years later, in the summer of 1987, the spark caught fire. My teacher held a year-end raffle and I won another blank pad of paper. I’d planned to draw a comic book, but I was never much of an artist. So instead, I started writing the story I wanted to tell.
Once the words started flowing, I couldn’t stop. By the end of that sunny August afternoon, the entire pad was full—and I had made a decision: I wanted to grow up to be a writer.
I wrote constantly for the next eight years. Nothing profound, just the kind of messy tales kids tell when they’re figuring out the world. Then, in 1993, everything changed. I discovered Clive Barker. For the next two years I devoured his work—often books that were probably too mature for me, but they stretched my imagination and gave me something worthy to chase. That fire produced my first two “novels”: Architect of Destruction (1995) and Backstabber (1996).
Looking back, they weren’t masterpieces. But for a teenager, they were wildly ambitious. And to my shock, people actually responded. Friends praised them. Kids I had never met tracked me down with Xeroxed copies, telling me how much they loved the stories. My creative writing teacher even read Architect of Destruction aloud to the entire class as a way to inspire them, to show them what the too might achieve.
For the first time, I had an audience. The feeling was addictive.
After high school, I chased the exploding indie film scene of the late ’90s. Over five years I made five short films and two features. Technology and money were constant barriers, but one project refused to die: a deeply personal story called Bloodshot.
When the original film fell apart in post-production, I couldn’t let it go. In 2006 I adapted the script into a novella, self-published it, and used it as a calling card to relaunch the project properly—with professional actors, a director, and even a soft “maybe” from Willem Dafoe’s agent for a small role.
We got meetings. We got interest. But I quickly saw the ugly machinery of Hollywood at work—the casual willingness to exploit the very actors who had trusted me. I walked away from several tempting offers rather than sell them out.
Bloodshot didn’t set the world on fire as a book, so plans for a trilogy felt pointless. Instead, I decided to publish all three stories together. But if this was going to be my final bow in publishing, I wanted to include other stories I loved—stories that spanned horror, romance, science fiction, and more.
To make the collection feel cohesive, I set them all in the same shared universe. The wild tonal shifts became a feature, not a bug. I called the book Manic Expression.
By 2010 I was writing a popular weekly column on That Guy With The Glasses under the screen name Manic Expression. When the site’s blog section was sidelined, I nearly walked away in protest. Then my friend Megan Wessels (the FanFic Critic) quietly built me a website and named it Manic Expression.
I gathered a crew of talented cast-offs from TGWTG, and word spread. Creators from around the world joined our supportive, chaotic, beautiful community.
Manic Expression reignited my love of writing. I wrote scripts for our audio dramas, expanded the original collection, and released a much more ambitious six-volume edition in 2017. In 2018 I took the leap and attended my first major writers’ conference, ready to pitch to agents and chase the big leagues.
What happened next… well, that’s a story for another week.
This 66-week series is my way of opening the vault. No more waiting for permission. No more perfect timing. Just the work—raw, honest, and finally free.
I hope you’ll join me for the ride.
James Daniel Walsh
About Author
Looking forward to seeing it released James.