Collaborators

Ken smiles politely as he reads the opening to FATA MORGANA

I've worked on many projects with Ken Mitchroney in the nearly 30 years we've been friends. When I wrote a draft of Toy Story 2 at Pixar, he was Head of Story for the project. I wrote an issue of his Space Ark comic book, and for a year I worked for Marvel writing Ren & Stimpy comics, most of which Ken drew. We once worked on, I swear to god, a set of Looney Tunes baseball cards for Chuck Jones.

Ken & I have written two feature-length screenplays together. We've pitched a lot of movies to a lot of nodding heads. (They listen, and then at the end they lean forward and say things like, "Well -- Jeffrey doesn't like cats.") We have one of those finish-each-other's-sentences creative brainshares that makes collaborating a lot more fun than sitting in a room by myself making stuff up. Ken & I have very different sensibilities, but somehow they dovetail almost seamlessly.

For years we've had a project we've wanted to do as a screenplay called Fata Morgana. We've even pitched it to a few studios. But over the years we' ve both grown tired of the nodding-head dance. It's a full-time dance, and it's not easy to maintain when you both have separate careers that require the bulk of your attention.

I started bugging Ken to work with me on Fata Morgana as a collaborative novel instead. We both thought it was a pretty commercial idea, and I figured I would enjoy writing a book that was just ... well, fun. A big summer blockbuster adventure. Something to make my agent smile and say, "Now that's what I'm talking about."

Then Ken finished a great gig directing a season of the popular Annoying Orange TV show and found himself with a stretch of time before he'd likely be back in L.A. on some new project. So he said, Hey, let's do Fata Morgana.  I said Hellyeahs.

Two years later the novel is nearly finished. In terms of research and plotting, it's the hardest thing I've ever done.  It'also been ridiculously fun. Our meeting on the day we got started was blessed by the gods with a ridiculous coincidence that I'll have to blog about separately.

This may help explain my >year absence from posting (I had to hire someone to sift through the barrage of emails that arrived becaused I stopped blogging. Oh,. no, wait -- that was a dream I had.)  I hope to be blogging more regularly after the novel is sent off to my agent.