Matt Hazard

Have you ever looked at your dog with complete distain after he rolls in a mud puddle after a fresh spring rain? Or perhaps rolled your eyes and gave an audible groan after stepping into a steaming pile of dog poop on your sunny morning walk? Well, that’s the same expression my wife gave me last month when I told her that had just watched the first Twilight movie. I know. I should be ashamed of myself, a grown man watching an old lame tween movie about vampires…what was I thinking? You should have seen her face when I told her I fully intended on watching the rest, too.

You may ask yourself, why man, why would he do that to himself? What could drive a man at his age to willingly withstand an hour and a half onslaught of terrible acting surrounding a plot about vegetarian vampires? The answer is more than just the simple fact that it has my Hollywood crush Anna Kendrick in it – I was using that series for motivation.

Many, many years ago, I dated a girl who was reading the Twilight book series. When I asked her what it was about, she turned into a sales person – moreover, a skilled liar.

“Oh, it’s awesome! It’s about a vampire who has super human strength and can move SUPER fast! There’s a part where a girl is about to get hit by a car, and the vampire flash steps across the parking lot and stops the car with his arm…like Superman!”

Holy shit, I thought. Yeah, that did me in. I bought the book and very early on, realized that it was a romance novel and not at all the contextual story of a badass vampire that she sold me on. We broke up, but I finished the series. Order of operation was never my strong point.

Not long after the books, got the itch the write. I wrote a short story about a badass vampire, the story that I wanted to read all along. That was my first taste of writing, and ironically it was born out of the Twilight series. And that was just the beginning.

Writing has been a back-seat hobby of mine for years. That passion is what started this blog over a decade ago, got me into standup, and ultimately landed me in the broadcasting industry in 2015. Then, life happened. I quit my gig at the radio station as an on air personality (the timing wasn’t right, or at least that’s the meal I keep feeding myself), got married to my beautiful wife, and as more time passed, eventually lost the bug to write. The canyon sized time gap in my blog-posting frequency reflects that. It wasn’t until recently that I started to get that creative itch back, but wasn’t sure how to recapture that lighting in the bottle feeling. And then one day Netflix, like the drinking buddy you didn’t know you needed, opened the hard bar and served me up a fresh mix of content. And there it was. Twilight, in all of its shimmering, sparkly glory.

Watching that particular movie put me back in an old mindset – a creative mindset that I just so happened to be in when I watched that movie the first time back in 2008. Old memories of that short story I wrote flooded in, and my index finger twitched. That’s the thing about inspiration – it’s completely and unequivocally out of our control. Whether is something as simple as watching your favourite hockey team win the Cup to push you to lace up the skates again, or something as embarrassing as watching a girlie teen movie to pick up a pen, when it hits, it hits.

Now, I’m not going to claim that the movie itself gets full credit for igniting a new creative direction, but it certainly was the push I needed to put fingers to keyboard again. And like most things in life, trying to get back to a confident state that was once held is not an overnight achievement – it takes work to get those proverbial muscles flexing like they used to. Twilight was simply a kick to get going, the same way a clerk smacks her computer for being too slow while trying to process your parking ticket at the DMV. And I really needed that smack.