As I strategize how to get back to my languishing book project, I think about the way my son Ingo built the animation portfolio that led to his acceptance at CalArts, the arts school founded by Walt Disney, three years ago.

Ingo developed a taste for animation gradually. Every Friday after school, starting around 2nd grade, he and I walked to Silver Moon Bakery to share a raspberry brioche, then went next door to the now-shuttered Movie Place to pick out a video for the weekend. He grew to love Hanna-Barbera, Looney Tunes, Dexter’s Lab and all the animation classics.

Then, at age 8, at the Museum of the Moving Image, he became fascinated by an interactive stop motion exhibit and fell in love with animation as an art form. He scoured animation books and when he turned 13 we gave him iStop Motion software. He started making coins dance on the table, played around with hats and socks, and did his first speech test. He made a paper and pencil animation about a gardener, and molded a putty-colored figure out of plasticene and wire, who scrambled up our globe to “conquer the world in 12 seconds!” But what Ingo really began to long for was to make his own, story-driven animated movie.

So, during the several weeks in June-July that I was away training Montessori teachers, Ingo and Chris launched a mini film camp. Chris being Chris, they set up a schedule of work time in the morning, down time after lunch, and errands that took them outdoors in the afternoon, mirroring Chris’ daily work schedule honed over many years as a freelancer.

In this way they tackled one puzzle of animation after another; claymation, hand drawn frames, sound effects, and rotoscopes, the technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement.

By the time he applied to art school Ingo had ten films in addition to 20 small tests, loops and exercises, and had acquired an unusual amount of animation experience, yet each had been done in relatively short bursts of intense summer activity, sometimes as little as one week. The camp alone did not produce films, but it jump-started him to work on projects independently.

Typical writing wisdom says to write daily; on Instagram people tackle various “100 day challenges,” in which they write or draw or sew every day. Yet this hasn’t worked for me when it comes to my book. In fact, I’d given up it up altogether until last fall, when I took a five-day writing workshop at Holy Cross Monastery, where something finally clicked. In my tiny monk’s cell, I wrote all morning, and in the afternoon, six of us met and read ten pages each, nibbling Divine Chocolate from the Monk’s Cell Book and Gift Shop.

It seems like so little time. One week a year! And yet this year I want to go again because it’s a show of faith for this project that won’t go away—and at a monastery with actual living monks. If things bog down I can pray for help five times a day at Matins, Holy Eucharist, Diurnum, Vespers and Compline.

Yet even as I write this doubt is an issue. What’s the point? It’s only a week! What if I fritter my time away? What if I never finish the book and it’s a waste of time and money? Why can’t I do this on my own? Why do I need so much support all the time? What am I, a dependent, spineless baby?

Then I remember one of Ingo’s favorite swordplay-filled anime and manga shows, Samurai Champloo, and I slay those defeatist thoughts. After all, in short concentrated bursts, Ingo found his way to a school he loves. And there he gets to make more movies like the one below about a guy stuck in a submarine, and this somber one set (of all places) in a Movie Place, very much like his old Movie Place, right next to the Silver Moon Bakery.