You'll have to excuse my friend. He's a little slow.

"It takes 20 years to make an overnight success." -- Eddie Cantor

I'm almost there! And in the words of hydroelectric schedule makers, "It's about dam time."

I've been acting professionally now for about 15 years. All that means is that I was first paid for acting when I was 22 or 23 (maybe 24? 25?). I played a rancher in a Cub Foods commercial. No lines. Only a few seconds on screen. But I got paid for it.

I wrote my first screenplay more than ten years ago. The next one I wrote, just a year later (and with co-writers), was optioned. Cockily cashing the small option check, I figured, was just practice before cashing the bigger checks just around the corner. I could almost taste the nectar of my blossoming screenwriting career.

The option expired and the movie was never produced. Bummer.

So I wrote and produced my own feature-length movie back in 2008. We secured distribution and the movie played all over the world. But nobody liked it. Drat.

A couple years later I wrote a sitcom pilot that I shot and released on the YouTube channel I co-founded and built around what was then the most watched online video ever. The channel earned me a few hundred bucks and almost as many headaches over the couple years we maintained it. D'oh.

Now I have a movie making the festival rounds, or I should say, making the festival application rounds. We were accepted into the first festival to which we applied but then rejected by the next. Now I wait on more than a dozen other festivals' decisions to screen or not to screen my latest labor of love that I wrote, directed, edited, produced, and played a lead role in.

Over the years I've created and produced dozens of my own projects, and acted in at least a hundred movies, commercials, and industrials for others in Minnesota and Los Angeles. I've written nine feature-length screenplays (and started 326 more, give or take), a couple television pilots, and three angry letters to Home Depot.

Actually, only two angry letters to Home Depot. But they deserved more.

Oh, and this awesome blog. How empty would the lives of you three pity-readers be without this blog?

Has any of it gotten me anywhere? Really? Have my efforts amounted to anything more than a side job or hobby? Will all the time I've dedicated to this career be worth anything when all is said and done? Am I really any closer now than I was 15 years ago?

All along this oftentimes painful journey I've never quit running. And I never will. I can't. No, seriously. I'm at the age now that if I stop running my muscles cramp up and it takes me a day to get them going again.

Momentum keeps building. I still believe that one day I will sputter into Hollywood on my hoggish scooter, Samsonite briefcase full of dreams clutched to my side. I'm nothing if not a dumb dreamer.

There are times I feel like Lloyd Christmas is talking about me, not Hairy Dunne, when he says, "You'll have to excuse my friend. He's a little slow."

I feel slow. Like my four-year-old's response to, "Dinner will be ready in a half hour," I'm slumping my shoulders, hanging my head, and moaning, "Ohhhh, it's taking fooooreverrrr!"

The challenge for me is to appreciate all that I have accomplished instead of kicking myself for not accomplishing more. This journey isn't what I expected, but every part of it may be necessary to one day become an overnight success.