Meet Christian Angeles

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christian Angeles a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Christian, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
I originally went to school for psychology to try and better understand the human condition, all while working through a couple of issues of my own. When I graduated I really thought I had a solid life path in mind, but then an accident hit, and I completely tore my Achilles tendon during a football match. Nothing hurt more in life than seeing all of my friends move on to better things after graduation, while I was stuck rehabbing for six months, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.

It was then that I read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman based on recommendations from some friends and family. That book ended up changing my life. Learning about the Endless, these anthropomorphic dreams and concepts of otherworldly beings beyond ourselves – I was taken aback by how much weight there was in this storytelling. It was then I realized, that I just wanted to do that as well. Tell stories. Live a life experiencing and sharing and being.

That’s when I decided to be a writer.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m a writer and journalist who covers the entertainment industry. Everything from films to books, comics, and conventions. More recently, works are debuting soon in scripted screenplays, comic books, and novels to come. I just absolutely love stories.

My mission statement is to create stories that move you. Things that will speak the truth in a world that seems to move further from it. Although I do think entertainment right now is in a golden age, it is also severely distracting in the wrong types of ways. That escapism to me feels oversaturated right now and so I’d like to talk about the hard subjects of today’s times. Create entertainment that informs and relates to people now about our uncomfortable new norms.

I think a lot of issues need to be said that aren’t being said for the sake of personal interest groups. So, what my company Monomythic (which is where I sign off on my creative writing projects) is seeking to achieve is to depict issues reflecting on the conflicts of today. To create not the Great American Novel, but rather, the great and global wake-up call. At the moment, I’m beginning this journey with a couple of comic books. First, is a submission in The Tomb of Baalberith Volume 2 – where myself and Jameson, the artist I’m collaborating with, created a story that’s a commentary on beauty influencers and modern social media culture. The problems that come about with one-dimensional personalities chasing fame for the sake of being famous.

We also will be creating a comic about zombies and consumerism that sort of parodies, through the use of satire, the zombie genre. It’s a lot about how humanity would have been better prepared for a  zombie over a COVID-19 pandemic. How it stopped being a moment of coming together for the greater good of humanity, and instead, became sort of a mess of forcing things to return to normal driven entirely by corporate human greed. It’s a comic of slightly suspended reality that’s like a ‘What if?” scenario if Shawn of the Dead kind of continued as a comic book series but realized that not only were zombies real, but so are ghosts and magic too. Yet none of that would matter to the zeitgeist of today unless a corporation could profit off of it.

These are the kinds of stories I like to create. Things that comment on societal issues.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Three skills essential to the journey were:

Skill 1 is situational awareness. It’s being able to critically analyze a situation by slowing down and taking in your surroundings. So much happens at the moment and I do think we’re in a very tech-driven instantaneous results reality driven by to-do lists that it never seem to meet our superficially inflated expectations. Mostly, because we’re too busy filtering out the noise. So being able to slow down and really take in what’s going on is key. It’s situational awareness. And it’ll keep your present, and therefore, ready for what happens next. This is also critical in journalism, as so much happens in the moment – you may miss it if you’re not paying attention.

Skill 2 is to always plan ahead. I like writing to-do lists and having daily objectives to keep me on task, even if they end up changing midway through my day. The real reason we use these isn’t so much the ends as it is keeping a steady means, as having a plan keeps your brain’s willpower in check. Truthfully, there’s only a limited amount of calls and choices you can make in a day before it starts to take its toll on you. It makes it easier to stick to a decision you made hours ago whenever you inevitably start to lose yourself and your attention span due to life’s ever-demanding torrent of calls you have to make.

I’ve also taken improv classes and played a lot of real-time strategy in my youth, and the one thing those situations and games taught me is that thinking on your feet only works if you’re stretching that muscle memory. So a neat little life hack I use: is to plan ahead your improvised plan! Something so that if A. Fails. You do B. And B. is already a rehearsed scenario. This type of strategy and pivoting helps keep you on track of all your goals.

Finally, skill 3 is more of a quality trait I take pride in: honesty. Honest with expectations. Honest with failures, insecurities, and goals. I wholly believe in the power of community, but these types of community efforts can only work if people say outright what they need. What they are doing and what they’re aspiring to do. Honesty is the only way you can get to be happy as no one will speak up for you – but yourself.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
The number one challenge I think most creatives face right now is getting attention. We’re in a different period in time where there’s more entertainment than ever before between social media, streaming services, books, and TV. It’s becoming a problem in that no one’s paying attention to the actual issues of the world around them. The news doesn’t help either, in that the stories that often need to be seen are buried, and what we’re often fed is fear-mongering or things to grasp at our attention. Heck, the attention economy on the whole has become a black hole pulling constantly at everything around it.

So how do we stand out? Where do we show our voice? What topics do we make our stand in saying, sharing, and establishing who we are within our community? Knowing how to do that, and actually be heard, is a great challenge for anyone right now. It’s a weirdly entertaining yet lonely time right now.

I think, that we’re so pressed for our immediate needs and feel so stretched thin by the daily struggle, that by the end of the day, most people simply appreciate the great distraction entertainment has become. It’s great that ideas more than ever have taken the front end of our cultural attention spans. Yet, it’s also terrible in that we’re not seeing the great pitfalls ahead of you. That when we do, most people just accept that they can do nothing to fix the problems of today. This becomes the cycle of life until you die if you’re not careful. This is how you can end up living a meaningless life.

Figuring out how to address this issue is sort of my greatest challenge. Especially, in this attention economy where the very thing I’m saying to perhaps spend less time on, is the very platforms I’d likely be trying to promote that message. So how to get attention to it is hard given it’s disruptive to the everyday things that get people by.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Image Credits: Tomb of Baalberith Volume 2 cover by Dario Carrasco Jr. and Mark McKenna along with colors by Ichsan Ansori. Selfie of me at NYCC 2022 in my press badge while pretending to power up with a Dragon Ball Z Saiyan backdrop. The next is my comic book in a day-winning comic: Paperless, written by me and drawn by Ryan J. Smith. Finally, my newest comic: Beautiful, featured in The Tomb of Baalberith Volume 2 written by me and drawn by Jameson Matunas.

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