We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rick Bickerstaff. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rick below.

Rick, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

I’m going to focus this on the book I just launched, All Roads Lead to Dockweiler: Devotions from the Ocean in the City of Angels.

My first writing gig was as a blogger for StoreYourBoard.com, who makes racks and storage options, primarily for the action sports world (surf, skate, snowboard, biking, climbing, etc.). I really loved writing about the sports I loved, trying to take creative angles to get folks to read and ultimately invest in good board storage. Well, this experience sparked the idea to start my own blog, where I had more freedom to write about anything, though I chose to focus on the framework of surfing and its connection to spirituality. I launched YonderBreaks.com in 2013 and got busy writing!

I can’t say the blog ever took off the way I wanted to (turns out people who surf don’t spend their time inside reading about surfing), but I wrote a ton of content that I was passionate about and also shot quite a few videos that related. During this time I also wrote my first novel and also started getting into music production (I know…focus Rick! Focus!). As the blog became more of a hobby, with an increasing emphasis on parenting, actually, I started feeling pretty called towards music, and so that became my main focus.

We moved across the country to South Carolina (where I grew up) and I was surprised to find myself immediately nostalgic for California, particularly my friends and the surf. And so one night I just started compiling blogs about surfing, organized and edited them for a longer format, wrote a bunch of new content and voila — All Roads Lead to Dockweiler was born!

I did one more pass on it and then let it go to work more on novels. I really didn’t know what to do with it! It was part practical surf instruction, part Los Angeles beach guide and part Christian devotional, all interspersed with memoir-type anecdotal stories that added some flavor throughout. It was the most fun thing I had ever had writing, but I didn’t know where it belonged.

And so it sat…

Until 2020, when I dusted it off and gave it another pass. Some time later my good friend and writing/film collaborator, Peter Harmon, and I were at a friends party and started talking about projects. He had written a couple comedy novellas that had been published, as well as a horror anthology under his own imprint, High Dive Publishing. I told him I had a few books I had written and he said he might be interested in publishing one if it involved music (knowing that had become my focus). Well, it just so happens that I had an album’s worth of songs that went along with All Roads, and I had always envisioned it being released alongside music to some capacity. So I sent him the manuscript, not expecting much since Peter didn’t surf.

To my surprise, however, Peter loved it! He wanted to partner on the project and so we got to work! High Dive always launches crowdfunding campaigns as a presale to raise some finishing funds for each book, and so we did the same. We got enough to pay a talented cover artist (Andrew Bartleson), get the book professionally edited and also hire an amazing book designer (Megan Katsanevakis of Hue Creative). Fast forward to December 2024 and the book was launched!

Rick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Hi, I’m Rick and I’ve enjoyed writing since grade school. I remember a story I wrote for a third grade assignment about a water droplet that loved getting tossed up by jet skis, but one day found himself caught up in the water cycle. It felt so fun to create anything with words and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was tapping into a part of myself that would remain.

I got into screenwriting in college and eventually moved to Los Angeles to pursue the discipline. With a few credits to my name, screenwriting expanded to blogs and novels and music reviews and books (I had also been writing songs since high school, so this was another poetic outlet). Now my first book has been published by High Dive Publishing. It’s called All Roads Lead to Dockweiler: Devotions from the Ocean in the City of Angels, and is about my first seven years in Los Angeles when I really fell in love with surfing, allowing the sport to become a framework through which I experienced big city culture shock, career exploration, marriage, fatherhood and faith.

My writing style is conversational, funny and full of heart. Really, I hope that folks who read it will be inspired to examine their own lives from a new perspective, hopefully laughing along the way.

I think what sets me apart is that my writing and my music have always gone hand-in-hand in my mind. All Roads Lead to Dockweiler includes a download of my full-length album, Golden Coast Summertime, which compliments the material in the book. I am currently rewriting a novel that has a similar idea, and much of my narrative writing has also been inspired by the music of others. I hope to continue releasing both types of projects together as compliments for each other, but also just another way to connect to people and get these ideas across.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I have heard many times in my life — as I’m sure other reads have as well — that success is “all who you know.” But somehow I just chose to ignore this advice early on in my career. My strongest example of this is when I was interning at Silver Pictures on the Warner Bros. lot, and instead of doing my best to hang out with the employees of this company that were making big budget features and television, I chose to hide in a back room and work on my own writing. Now I will admit that I was also working a job to pay the bills about an hour-and-a-half away, as well as interning at a smaller production company and doing some side work to, again, pay the bills (LA is expensive!). And so I knew that the one day a week that I was able to intern at Silver probably wasn’t going to make much of a difference in my life…but maybe it could have?

In my mind I was enjoying the peace and quiet of getting a lot of writing done, as well as doing something creative on the movie lot of one of the most famous film companies in the world; but what if I had spent that time hanging in the main atrium of the creative executives offices to show my face? I had developed passing relationships with a couple of the executives — what if I had fostered those more? Would my career in film had turned out any differently? I guess I’ll never know.

The funny part about when this concept of “who you know” really solidified for me is years later, after my family and I had left LA for South Carolina, only to move back a couple of years later. We were living in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles at the time and I was picking up my daughter from school. I overheard the sounds of skateboarding (which my ears are quite attuned to hearing, from decades in the sport) from a nearby dad’s phone and asked what he was doing. “Editing skate videos,” he said, and we became fast friends. It turns out that he had his own skateboard company, which later became my skateboard sponsor. Fast-forward a few more years and I was at a local skate/surf shop where I knew the owner. He introduced me to the manager of his skate team and we hit it off, both being dads, musicians and skateboarders (what a mix!). The next thing you know I’m on the skate team for a skate shop as well.

Now if you had known me in 2004, you would have known that becoming a pro skateboarder was my loftiest dream in life. I had the wisdom to go get a college degree as well, but skating was what I really wanted to do. I wrote down a list of tricks I needed for my “sponsor me” video, as well as spoke to a Christian skate team that came through town to see what it would take to get on. Eventually, I got busy with school and a girlfriend, and the dream faded, but getting these two sponsors years later was something of a fulfillment of that. But to tie it in with the original idea, that only happened because I “knew a guy.” Sure, I had some skills to back up the connection, but I didn’t get on those teams just on my skateboard merit alone, and I would even say that those personal connections far outweighed any skill on a skateboard in their decision making process. And so it really cemented in the fact that I need to foster relationships in whatever I’m trying my hand at doing (which now is music and writing books), a lesson learned far too late in life.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I’ve often heard people who “make it” in the arts say that, if you can do anything else, you should, because it’s just so damn difficult to find success in creative arts. It is also true that just about everyone who pursues art as a career struggles with the notion of choosing a “regular job,” and whether or not that would be easier, and maybe even a little bit fulfilling. Well, I’m approaching forty now, and have had many jobs in several different industries, but no matter where I find myself, I am always finding some way to be creative on the job. Whether it is writing songs at my desk while I work data entry, or outlining stories in between the more mundane parts of my airline job. I am often skating to my day job and recording voice memos of songs I started writing after I left my house, trying to finish them before I clock in; or editing novels on my iPad during my lunch break. No matter what, I can’t seem to not be creative, and so I guess I’m one of those people who can’t do otherwise. I don’t know if that makes it a mission, but I just can’t seem to help being making something!

There is this quote that I believe is attributed to Hank Williams (though I can’t seem to find any reference to it…sorry!) that I’ll paraphrase as: Songs aren’t written by us, they are given to us. Essentially, what that quote is suggesting — and I believe it — is that creative thought is a gift from God. I know in my own life that my best and most creative undertakings just show up, words spilling onto the page as if they are falling from the sky, or composition ideas when I’m producing that seem to come from nowhere, but totally fit the music or solve a problem. I can’t claim these concepts as my own because I have no idea where they come from, and so I’ll just have to count myself as a conduit and thank God that He chose me to deliver them this time. And so to answer your question, I think my goal or mission is just to leave myself open to these thoughts from God and try to let them flow as truthfully and faithfully as I can.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.yonderbreaks.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yonderbreaksmusic
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yonderbreaks
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-bickerstaff-0656479
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@surfyonderbreaks
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/yonderbreaks

Image Credits

Photos by Mondo Scott (https://www.instagram.com/mondoscott), Nico Fernandez (https://www.instagram.com/nico_dude_x), Katie Bickerstaff, Josh Moreno (https://www.instagram.com/joshua_moreno_design)