Halfway Through An Even Weirder Year
The WGA is on strike. Still. Since my last post here, “Artificial Intelligence” has become a real threat to the livelihoods of writers and creative people of all kinds. I don’t know about you, but a future where the computers get to write poetry, create music & make art while we humans continue to do all the sh#tty jobs is not what I was expecting – nor is it what we were promised.
The strike has been eye-opening for a few reasons. As I mentioned in previous posts, my lit. agent died (from Covid) over a year ago. Since then, I’ve been trying to establish or re-establish some professional contacts with agencies and production companies on my own. I’ve made hundreds of calls in the past six months. Anyone who has tried this will tell you that it can be very frustrating to play phone-tag for days, weeks, or even months only to eventually get blown off with the standard excuse “We only accept submissions from agents.” But now here’s the thing: As the Writer’s strike reaches the two month mark, I have gotten calls from TWO different production companies that had either ignored me or blown me off for the past year+. They’re suddenly “interested in” either my horror feature or one of my pilots now, and “would I like to come in and talk about them?” – These are exactly the kinds of phone calls I’ve been working on getting for the past couple of years, but now, I have to ignore them, and I have. Because, as the son of two pro-union parents, I’m no scab.
I have also kept a New Year’s Resolution that I made back on January 1st: I have managed to climb back on stage. A few months ago I auditioned into the company of the LA Connection Theater. Where I now spend every Tuesday evening in rehearsal/class and get to do two Saturday shows a month. It still feels a bit weird. Even though I’ve been doing the storytelling and spoken word shows, open mics and even played guitar publicly, I haven’t been part of a “theater company” since my beloved bang. theater closed. My new theater focuses on short-form improv and “games” which are fun, but after years of doing long-form improv it is an adjustment to shift gears to the lower-stakes and increased “structure” of doing improv “games.” I am also still getting to know my cast mates, and getting back up-to-speed performance-wise, but so far I’m glad to be doing it and enjoying the Tuesday night workouts as much as the actual shows. We’ll see how it goes.
As I look back on my “activity log” for 2023 so far (yes, I keep an ‘activity log’) I am realizing that I haven’t written any screenplay pages this year. I haven’t even worked on (much needed) rewrites of a couple of my existing scripts. …but I have been writing. A lot. I’ve cranked out two 15k eBooks, I have done some ghostwriting and in just the past month, I’ve written over 40k words on a memoir of sorts and will likely top out over 100k words by the time my self-imposed mid-August deadline rolls around.
Maybe “memoir” is too grandiose a word. With all the writing projects that are always on my to-do lists, suddenly and without warning THIS (writing about myself) became the top priority in my mind. It could be because I’m approaching some major personal milestones, I don’t know. I just realized I had hit a point where my past keeps bubbling up in my head and affecting my present. For a while now, everything else I have been trying to write has felt lifeless and false or it just fizzled out, and I kept coming back to the feeling that it was finally time to write about myself… even if I’m writing just for myself. I think, like a lot of people, these past couple years have been a time of introspection and of questioning what it is I really want to spend my time doing. It is also a time to re-take some personal inventories and see where I have been failing myself and where I’ve been living up to my own expectations. …and maybe I’m finally ready to face and work through some stuff from my past. I’m not exactly having “fun” with this particular project, but I am feeling good about the progress I’m making on it. I also feel like I can’t work on anything else – or if I do, the work will be sub-par – until I see this “memoir” through to the end. I just can’t ignore it anymore.
If all of this sounds self-absorbed well, it is my website. The whole point of it is to post personal updates and news… but believe me: I am well-aware that the world continues to be on fire and it looks like even more difficult and tricky times lay ahead for all of us. I can only hope that kindness, cooperation and love can triumph over this moment in time where hate, intolerance and avarice are so in vogue. As a species we have so much potential that we’re not living up to.
