We spent the New Years holiday on the beach at Port Aransas.

This was my first visit to the “Texas Riviera” and even though the weather was cool and mostly overcast, it did not disappoint. It may sound like a strange choice for a vacation destination, but we needed to get the hell out of town. We found a great condo with a kitchen right on the beach. And it was dog-friendly so we didn’t have to leave Daisy at home.

It was a very low-key few days – a rarity for us. We spent most of the time like total nerds – writing screenplays on the deck while drinking margaritas. We ate a lot of seafood and made a wicked beach fire, but spent New Years Eve itself watching TV with the dog. In fact, this is the first New Years Day I can remember that I wasn’t totally hung over. It was actually pretty awesome.

For me the trip was a complete mental “re-boot.”

2011 was a roller-coaster of a year filled with lots of emotional highs and lows, a relentless production schedule, the publication of a book, winning YouTube Next Chef, speaking gigs at conferences and too many other things to mention. There’s nothing like a few days of staring at the ocean to blow out the cobwebs in your brain.

I came back from the beach completely refocused and recharged.

With the ramp-up of Hilah Cooking and my other projects, I’ve completely neglected this site. I only published once in 2011. I am “re-booting” it as well. I did a lot of writing in 2011 that was intended for this site, but for a variety of reasons, I never pushed publish. Now it’s time.

As part of the reboot, I stripped the design down to the absolute basics. This is about as simple as it gets. I’ll be experimenting with it a lot as we go.

I also deleted almost all of the old posts. I kept four of them because they directly relate to the topics I’ll be focusing on for the coming year.

• Web Series Production. For as long as I can remember, filmmaking and publishing have been the things I’m most passionate about. Web Series really hit the sweet spot for me as far as combining the two things. I’ll be launching two new series in 2012 – one scripted, one unscripted. We’re also about to begin the second Phase of Hilah Cooking, which is going to be exciting. I’ll be detailing all the behind-the-scenes details here.
• Digital Content Strategies. I’ve learned a LOT since we launched Hilah Cooking and continue to learn more every day. I’m going to start posting about it here on a regular basis. It will get nerdy. I’ll be going into mind-numbing detail on everything from optimizing YouTube meta data to building web sites that actually work.
• Independent Publishing. I’ll be touching on both digital and print. I don’t believe that print is dead and I will be involved with both print and digital book projects in the coming year.

All the big articles will be here on the blog. Supplementary stuff (photos, videos, etc.) will be published via Tumblr and Google+.

Thanks for reading!