Inside the Mind - Andy Collen

Watching people talk about Aspen on social media these days is a bit like watching someone else ski your favorite line, recognizable, but missing the rhythm you remember. It got me thinking that maybe it was time to bottle up the real thing, the Aspen we knew back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, seen through the eyes of kids who had the whole mountain as their playground. Everyone’s heard the polished stories of grown-ups and their high-dollar misadventures, but nobody really captured the scrappy, unsupervised freedom of being young in a town that hadn’t yet figured out it was supposed to be famous. Something closer to Stand by Me, but with more altitude and a lot more dirt under your fingernails. So I rounded up three old school friends, the kind who still remember where all the secret trails led, and we set out to lock it all down, the stories, the laughs, the moments that only make sense if you were there. It wasn’t about nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake; it was about getting it right, telling the local version before it disappears under layers of reinvention. Times have changed, no doubt about it, but that’s what makes it worth looking back, because somewhere in those stories is the Aspen that raised us, raw and real, still carving turns in memory like fresh tracks on a powder day.

Growing Up Aspen - Adventures of the Unsupervised was my first and latest book. Its about what was going on in Aspen during the 70's and 80's only through a pint sized perspective.

In Growing Up Aspen – Adventures of the Unsupervised, we didn’t have to dream up characters—they were already larger than life, walking right down the streets of Aspen. When you’ve got neighbors and parents like Hunter S. Thompson or John Denver in the mix, the line between ordinary and extraordinary disappears pretty quickly. These weren’t legends to us back then, they were just part of the backdrop, like the mountains themselves, shaping the stories without even trying. And then there were the steady hands of history, folks like Ralph Jackson and others from the 10th Mountain Division, who carried a different kind of weight into town. They brought grit, perspective, and a quiet toughness that balanced out the wild energy of the place. Put it all together, and you realize we didn’t invent anything, we just paid attention. The town gave us everything we needed, and all we had to do was ride it like a good line down the mountain and try to keep up.

These days, I find myself keeping those voices alive in the only way I know how, by writing, by remembering, by letting the spirit of people like Hunter S. Thompson and John Denver echo through the words I put down about these turbulent times on Substack. It’s not about imitation, it’s about connection, about asking how they might have seen the world today, how they might have tried to make sense of it, and then letting that feeling guide the story. Like a song carried on the wind through Aspen, it’s a way of honoring where we came from while trying to find a little clarity, and maybe a little hope, in where we’re going.

Being a self-published indie writer feels a lot like those early days in Aspen, before the shine of brands like Prada and Gucci found their way into the storefronts. It gives you the freedom to tell the truth as you remember it, the rough edges, the honest laughter, the people who built a life there without ever thinking it would become something polished. It’s not about chasing sales or trends; it’s about holding onto a feeling, a time when stories were lived before they were marketed. It’s a way of capturing the grit and grace of local life, just as it was, and sharing it with anyone willing to listen.

One of the hardest parts of bringing those memories to life was simply finding where they belonged in time, because the mind has a gentle way of bending moments, blending summers together and softening the edges of what really happened. But sitting down with my friends, the same ones who lived those days with me in Aspen, we started to piece it all back together, one story leading to another, one memory sparking the next, until a timeline began to take shape. It became less about being perfectly accurate and more about being true, guiding each other back to those moments with a kind of shared understanding, like harmonizing on a song we all somehow still remembered.

No

If I could offer a bit of advice to anyone starting out, I’d say begin with something that lives close to your heart, something tied to the very core of who you are, because that’s where the truth tends to sing the clearest. When you feel that connection, your words carry it forward, and your readers can feel it too, like a melody drifting across a quiet valley. Good writing has a way of taking people somewhere, across time, across landscapes, into moments they’ve never lived but somehow understand, and that kind of journey only happens when the writer believes in the road they’re traveling.

Selling a book isn’t so much about pushing it out into the world as it is about finding gentle, meaningful ways to let it be discovered, like a song carried on the wind. When you can connect the themes of your story to the rhythms of everyday life, the small lessons, the shared feelings, you invite people to see themselves in what you’ve written. And the more creatively you draw those connections, the more your readers begin to carry the story for you, passing it along not as a product, but as something that meant a little more, something worth sharing.

My next book will be about when I first arrived in Portland back in ’89, it had that same unpolished, creative spark I remembered from Aspen, a place where the industry hadn’t yet built walls around itself. You didn’t network in boardrooms; you met people in pickup basketball games, sharing stories between plays, building trust the old-fashioned way. Those were the days when the independent animation scene felt like a community more than a business, where the path to working together started with a handshake and a shared passion rather than a contract. By 1991, my wife and I took that spirit and poured it into building Happy Trails Animation, a small boutique studio with big ideas. Over the years, as the world shifted and technology evolved, so did we, eventually helping pioneer a style we called the Motion Comic by 2008, working with studios like The Walt Disney Company, BBC Worldwide, and Universal Pictures. This book isn’t just a story, it’s a walk through those projects, a reflection of an industry in motion, capturing how creativity adapts, survives, and finds new ways to tell stories as the tools and the world around it continue to change.