The Jarvis Report
Skate Like the Guy Who Roller Skated Across France: Discover the Secret Roller Skating Tips and Techniques You Wish You Knew Sooner!
Hey fellow roller skating enthusiasts! Strap on your wheels and get ready to level up your skating skills. I'm J Michael Jarvis, a roller skating fanatic who once skated 800 miles across the French Riviera. Today, I'm here to share **10 roller skating tips and...
Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling
Godspeed, Mitchell
The chapters have been rewritten, wordsmithed, de-filtered, slashed and finally prepared for final editing. Years of writing real-life characters I once knew so well have brought me back into their lives through social networks and in-person meetings. Thanks to all of...
Holding the Diamond
The story - behind the book and the photo - is a celebration of arrival. Not the arrival of a teenager who just crossed France on roller skates, but the arrival of a teen into adulthood. Fueled by testosterone and hubris, guys tend to test their limits of...
Roller Skating Across France
I never found a definitive answer to the question; am I was the first person to roller skate across France? 1981 was a good 10-15 years before real Internet to search was there, and certainly, we had nothing in the local library with information like that. Nothing in...
On this day in 1981
June 14, 1981, I rolled eight wheels across the border of Spain. It’s 1981. An American teenager on a self-reliant gap year in Europe can’t bear the idea of going back to his dependent life at home but still lives on the fringe of manhood. His girlfriend is visiting...
Chapter 1
Day one in the book includes a little action like this in an Italian tunnel. It's very much like these guys, only without the helmet, in silk shorts, and wearing a 35 lb. backpack. I'm also closely followed by two double-decker tour busses. I don't suppose these guys...
Life on the Other Side of Limits
33 years ago today I became the first person to street-ski across France —from Italy to Spain—carrying a 35 lb backpack and ski poles up and down the hills of the French Riviera. From skating through Monaco's Casino and Gran Prix to the Film Festival in Cannes, I...
Friends Found on Facebook
Since I started my Facebook account, I've looked for a few of the main characters in the book, my long lost friends. Today I was cleaning out more of the boxes and still finding stuff—namely my little black book. Truth-be-told, it's red but it's still a little address...
Rewrites
I've heard it said by writers - " the real work starts after you finish the book." We're talking about the laborious task of rewriting. The first draft of a manuscript is anything but a breeze, however, it feels much breezier than sitting down to scrutinize each...
Preface
It's 2012. I'm in my garage looking through a lifetime or memories from my parent's storage unit. After they passed within a couple months of one another last year, we four siblings decided we would store the boxes of memories until we all had some time to go through...
Skiing the Alps-phalt
Skiing down France's double-black diamond beach cliff roads into towns like Monte Carlo, Cannes and Nice pumps adrenaline like skiing, however, knowing the asphalt is far less forgiving than powder of the Alps increases the danger to the point of "fall and you die."...
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