Nate Eckman, Austin, TX (2025)

02/13/2025

Coming back to the city starting this summer to start a masters at NYU! Can’t wait to show yall what kind of stories I bring to screen next.

12/03/2024

Live anywhere for seven years and you’re bound to make plenty of memories and friends. But no one warned me that I was going to be given the best of both.

I’m forever grateful to you wild bunch. You know who you are. You gamblers and techies. Pole dancers and two steppers. Fly fishers and fitness enthusiasts. Entrepreneurs and local billiard stars. Rappers and pitbull mommies. Country singers and karaoke feins. Trans men and women. All you g**s - so many g**s. You loyal friends who celebrate things like a friendiversary. You readers who made my first book possible. Cinephiles who encouraged and helped me to make my first short film. Old lovers who mended my heart, just in time to meet my soul mate. You, Austinites, who beautifully excavated these seven years from a bleak and short line of time, and shaped them into something beautiful.

I’m not in Austin anymore. And I’d be lying if I said I knew what was next. At times thats been scary. But when I feel this fear or regret creep up I grasp to the memories of your inspiring lives and in that moment I’m no longer afraid, because I’m home again.

So I guess for now it’s so long and till next time, y’all.

10/28/2024

This summer, after another round of MFA applications ended with rejection, I dug into my pile of unfinished scripts and committed to bringing one to screen.

I’d been thinking of making a movie since 2019, when a filmmaker, producer, and now dear-friend, commissioned me to write a feature about a veteran struggling to transition back into civilian life.

I was hooked. But couldn’t find the momentum to find another project. Covid started. Then a divorce. Then a change of jobs. My life was starting over. Creative projects would have to wait. But in the interim I kept watching films, and reading just as much about movies and their makers.

One of the greats I studied with particular acuity was Paul Schrader. He’s a fellow midwesterner, who spent his early life steeped in the church, and went on to study philosophy and history. As the broad-stroked similarities multiplied I started imagining myself as an asymptote to his life’s trajectory, following its traces in my own way. Hoping that my unconventional twists and turns also lead me to a fulfilling life in making movies.

Time will tell.

But last week I had the immense pleasure of reading through his papers at the Ransom Center in Austin, TX. There’s an indescribable power to touching the physical works of a person, to see the coffee stained edges, nonsensical scribbles in the margin, and early rough drafts. There’s a realness to the works which, despite all the internet’s pronouncement for authenticity, cannot be rivaled by anything published online.

I left their contemplating about all that’s changed since 2019, proud to have made my first short film, and brimming with ideas about my second.

10/23/2024

Scenes from set of this little movie called Diagnosed. In April I hope to announce which dream film-festival I’ll get to premiere this short. Until then, I’m editing, preparing submissions, and starting to write the next movie I hope to bring to screen.

Photos shot and developed by THE .r.stryker

08/07/2024

Script is production ready. Crew is starting to come aboard. Casting calls begin Friday. This thing is really starting to come together. And yeah I’m excited to one day share it, but I’m especially loving the process of making my first film.

03/25/2024

When you turned 31 we weren’t yet engaged, hadn’t imagined a wedding, or that we’d start our first seven months of marriage with me unemployed — feeling both so in love with you and unwanted by the world. It was an intense year, a fast one, one that could left us damaged. But because of your steadfast partnership and hope in us, we lived a beautiful year. The big moments were grand. But it was the little laughs and impromptu dates, the gentle glances and ten second dances — those things we’d the chance to share everyday — that made it so remarkable. I can’t believe I get to live beside you. And damn I can’t wait to see what you make of 32.

Some of my favorites of this past year.

1. Our first photo as engaged.
2. Lexi learns a new instrument.
3. Lexi winning.
4. Lexi finds a pony.
5. Wedding ready.
6. Lexi finds a better follower than me.
7. Lexi takes a very important call.
8. First date night after moving in with each other.
9. A SHOW ABOUT DEATH!
10. Lexi watches the superbowl.

03/22/2024

Harold Bloom called it the Anxiety of Influence. I prefer to consider them a heaping of blessings. These are a few.

In writing his masterpiece Midnight’s Children six years after his castigated debut, Salman Rushdie taught me to embolden and nurture that shy, small, voice inside me still too timid to splay itself across the page. In Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka offered solace in navigating modernity’s estranging isolation. In Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, I’d capitulated to the fact that one day I will look around and realize that nothing around me, not even me, will be what it seems; and from that point, all of life becomes a great adventure.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories — now translations from her own Italian — embody the pinnacle achievement of authorship in her perpetually evolving use of language. And to the one whose best works were among his last, Roth, oh filthy Philip Roth, whose Human Stain shook me with the most haunting epiphany that every person’s nature frolics beyond the constitution of words.

In these disparate iotas, denominating stories both magical and realistic, vestiges of my soul reawaken. In their pages life is both realized and re-imagined.

03/21/2024

The drafts of each particular me pile high in the unnavigable memory of my past. I investigate them for clues that can guide me to what’s next. Anything precocious or enduring. There: evidence to arraign my soul before celestial courts. After trial I’ll receive my conviction — a direction. The case runs cold. So the question looms. Who, and why, am I?

01/30/2024

Should your desires transpire from an untraceable set of transmissions, your actions appease the assaults of an average, your very intelligence heed to the outputs of another most unnatural, what then would be left of you? Of us?

The atom of democracy is the individual. Remove you, the concept that there could ever be a body and mind separate, independent, and free then the world as we know it collapses. Your little name becomes decimated into an even smaller number in an enormous database. Good morning, 24601.

I do not celebrate Neuralink successfully planting its first device into a live human this week. To suggest that this is an undisputed demonstration of human progress is foolish. If not for the philosophical reason that our minds should remain, as much as possible, independent, then for the particularities of Neuralink’s leadership operating within a country with a particularly inept governing body, which seem to all but guarantee that the promises of medical care will dissipate in the heat of board arguments over unprecedented control of information and capital — i.e. your thoughts.

I tried to capture the state of this world in my debut novel After Thought. I’ve moved on from this world and have been busy at nights writing my second book. It’s been a refreshing and daunting escape. Though, each morning, burdens from the day’s news compound. So, if I sound like I’m writing like I’ve got a chip on my shoulder, just wait until I’ve one implanted into my head.

12/20/2023

I’m recommending just one book in 2024. Tomorrow morning, I’ll reveal what it is and why it’s my only recommendation of the year, to subscribers of speculatively. It’s free to join. Just peep that link in bio.

Who knows, maybe after reading it, you will — like me — forever wander, seek, and times swear that you see a two-mooned sky. #2024

12/17/2023

This was the last paper I wrote in farsi. Five pages about something I now need Google translate to understand. When I read each letter reflexive, unfamiliar, sounds pour out my mouth. Strung together, these tones form words which have lost all meaning. I’m saddened by this fact. Not for it’s literal meaning, that I’ve lost a language. But for what it suggests…that I’ve traded my curiosity in pursuit of more employable skills.

This has happened elsewhere in my mind: with laws, histories, equations. Knowledge replaced with a host of excel formulas and project frameworks. Master of tools and techniques for ‘optimizing’ and ‘scaling.’ Alright, I’m sharing, can everyone see my screen? Let us begin our presentation. More each day I feel like a character casted into this role of Nate, responsible for delivering a most reprehensible script, which, if played well, guarantees me all the comforts of some upper-middle-crust.

Okay, so let’s follow the money. I’m no longer holding a script, but on a reality TV show. The premise is to exchange snippets of my memory for cash, would I go as far as to trade all I know for every possible dollar? I’ve gone this far. The cost of my duller, dumber, quieter mind? Here, I’ll open my Chase app. It aint much.

What to do now? Continue to play the game? Is it too late to reverse the rules, barter some of this cash to squash this nostalgia in and for myself? Let’s see.

**There’s a lot here I’m still putting into words. Once I do, I’ll share these complete thoughts with subscribers to my site. Sorry if this sounds baity — I just don’t believe any social media is conducive to longform thinking. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can become one via link in bio. Note: unlike my dilemma, it’s free!

10/04/2023

I was prepared to gamble my spine on an operating-room table. Back surgeries, a common prescription for chronic cases like mine, are only 50% successful. Which leads to follow-up procedures. But the success rate halves with each subsequent operation. In my darkest hours, I wondered if life was worth enduring any more of that pain -- if it would ever escape me. Then I heard whispers of another therapy that had astounding effects. It sounded too good to be true. Good. I was looking for a miracle.

One week after receiving stem cell injections I literally felt my back rebuilding itself. My discs, once herniated and degenerative, inelastic to years of therapy, had healed. Though I continue to work through layers of scar tissue, muscle tightness and weakness, the pain has disappeared.

What saddens me is that I needed to discover this remedy myself, outside the hospital system built for veterans. It made me wonder how many people today, veteran or not, suffer unnecessarily with back injuries. I took a break from fiction this month to write about my experiences of being bed ridden on and off for years, to once again being active. You can read 'Not Built For You' via my link in bio.

08/30/2023

Excerpt from -phobic, a short story publishing this Friday. It’s about a man trapped on a future, uninhabitable, earth who confronts his heliophobia. But once outdoors, he discovers a greater, inescapable fear.

Only subscribers of Speculatively can read the piece. It’s free, and easy to sign up via link in bio.

07/30/2023

All talk of discipline and perseverance overlooks some exceptional ingredients to writing books. Murakami was an owner of a Jazz Club who, while attending a baseball game, was suddenly stricken with the conviction that he would go home and make his living as a writer. The seedlings of what would become Harry Potter came to Rowling while she awaited a train. Douglas Adams thought of the concept to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" while laying drunk in a field in Austria.

This week I start the first draft of my second book. I plan to shape these pages as much by time in chair as I will from aimless walks across town and drinking beers on stools where taps are cheapest.

Tell me your favorite ways to conjur your creative spirit and I’ll give those a try, too.

07/28/2023

The career trajectory of writer’s is so often a story of maddening perseverance, and damned luck. Cormac McCarthy’s first five novels were essentially flops. Stephen King tossed his debut novel “Carrie” into the trash, it was his wife who later retrieved it from the can and encouraged him to submit it for publication. Decades after Herman Melville’s death, critics finally recognized “Moby-Dick” as a piece of literary genius.

I guess the truth is if you’re making art there’s a chance that your audience, the majority of the people who will be changed by your work, aren’t even born yet.

So, you, writer, painter, poet, singer, you daunted artist, take heart. And whatever you do, keep making your art.

07/25/2023

Hemingway’s father read his son’s debut novel, In Our Time, and refused to keep a copy in his house because he thought the work was “filth.” I think about that, a lot. What if Ernest listened to that voice and believed after his first that he was unfit to write?

BTW, PBS is still very cool and I highly recommend streaming Ken Burn’s documentary on the life and death of Ernest Hemingway.

Photo from the cover of the series.

07/24/2023

I’m giving away audiobook copies of After Thought on Spotify to select subscribers of my site, Speculatively. If you’re already subscribed you’re enrolled in the giveaway. If you’re not, and you want a chance to listen to the book readers are calling “mind bending” and “chilling” subscribe to speculatively via link in bio. Those selected will receive an email Friday morning!

07/19/2023

The first time I read Vonnegut I scoffed. On my first attempt, I could not finish Dostoevsky's masterpiece, "The Idiot."

I’ve come to find these revulsions as marks of great literature. A book that warms your heart and casts upon your face a mellow, unchanging smile, meets you exactly where you are.

Great books move you to tears and anger and disgust and triumph, they cull within you a most raw set of emotions to the surface. It’s in those emotions where a shift begins. But who is to say when you’re ready for such change?

And that is the second mark of great literature, that is each time you encounter its pages it never reads the same. So, if you’ve found yourself reading a book that turned your head hot, or caused your skin to crawl, or had you gasping in disgust you should pick that book back up. You might find yourself delighted in its presence.

And to those books that made you feel nothing at all. Odds are they never will. And that’s okay. Not every book is for everyone.

Nate Eckman