People ask me how the writing is going.

I usually sigh and say some version of, “I’ve got a couple movies in development. Both with producers attached. They were kinda dead. Now they’re alive again. Maybe.”

What does that mean? How do movies die and then come back to life? How do movies get made at all? There’s no easy answer. Every movie is a miracle. That movie based on some old toy you make fun of because it sounds ridiculous? A miracle. The fourth sequel to a franchise you forgot existed? A stunning achievement.

Seriously, getting anything made is nearly impossible. Why? Movies are crazy expensive and require a ton of people to get on the same page and stay there throughout the process. It shouldn’t be this hard, but it is. And most movies are big corporate endeavors based on stuff so they have money to spend.

A movie that starts with a writer like me writing a script and hoping to get something made? That’s about as hard as it gets. Some people go the super-indie route with local actors and crew, raising money from friends, family, and local rich people. They take their labor of love to a film festival and try to sell it. What they’re really doing is trying to get someone, anyone, to care. It’s not easy.

I write the kind of movies that require bigger budgets than that. Of my three produced projects, one was a studio film while the other two would be considered “indie” even though they had movie stars and budgets in the millions. So what’s the path for a project like that? It looks like this:

It usually begins with a producer reading the script and seeing potential. Then they go and find a director. Then the producer and director try to attach a star. They do all this without any money, because no one wants to spend money on a movie until it’s actually getting made. If you’re lucky enough to get a star, then you go to financiers. Or a studio. Or maybe to a much bigger producer with a production company and they take it to a studio. But no one wants to take anything to a studio because if the studio passes, this puts the project at risk. So instead everyone works to perfect the package, make it undeniable, which apparently involves an endless amount of phone meetings and emails.

Every phone call, every time someone passes, creates the ultimate danger in the life of a movie: a loss of momentum. If at any stage of that process things slow down, the movie is in danger of dying. A few directors pass? The movie can die. You find a great director but they can’t land the right actor? The movie can die. And by dying, I mean it’s floating in the limbo of “eh, maybe?”

Movie’s are in danger of dying every damn day. And this goes on for years. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and again): making movies is not for the faint of heart.

What every movie needs is a dog that won’t let go of the bone. The person who refuses to let a project stall. Someone who can hear no a thousand times and keep fighting. And here’s the weird thing:

It’s usually not the writer.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Well, only one actually. Writers have no power. Not really. We birth a project from nothing, and that’s special. But what’s not special is for us to really, really want our movie to get made. Of course we do. But no one cares, not really. Who do people listen to? Whose passion carries a project over the finish line?

There are basically two choices: The director. Or the producer. Sometimes an actor comes on early and they become the champion that refuses to let a movie die, but that’s rare. Here are some personal examples:

My first movie was The Air I Breathe which I co-wrote with director Jieho Lee. Jieho was the glue that kept that project together. It was his vision, his baby. His passion brought producers aboard and they moved heaven and earth to get the movie made. But it was Jieho who kept it all together. Actors loved the script, but no one committed to being in the movie until they met Jieho and heard his vision. No one did it for the paycheck. They did it because Jieho was leading the charge and they were willing to follow him into battle.

Killers was a different beast altogether. It was a studio movie, with many producers and three directors over the course of its development. The glue that kept that movie together was my manager CP (who was also an Executive Producer on the movie). He refused to let that movie stall. There was actually a day where Lionsgate’s option on the project expired. CP felt that there was no better chance at getting the movie made so he called the studio and through pure will got them to agree to extend the option. That call changed my life. When the movie was finally made, a different producer took the victory lap at the premiere. That’s one of the weird (awful) things about this business. You rarely know who deserves credit on anything.

My third movie Classified was a rarity - a relatively painless process. My producers really wanted to make the movie, and a year and a half after their company optioned my script, they put together the financing, hired a director and some movies stars, and rolled cameras.

I should mention I was never on the sidelines during any of these projects. There were key moments when I stepped up and did a rewrite that saved each of them. But I was never the day-to-day guy who kept those movies alive. I wasn’t the producer. Or the director. Or heaven forbid the star. I was the guy who birthed a baby, handed it over to a bunch of other people, and said please don’t drop my baby.

I should be honest. Those babies got dropped a lot. Sometimes I was there to break their fall. Sometimes not. But as for my current projects…no one’s dropped em lately. They’re all out there, trying to live. Which is the one thing that’s really important to know:

Movies never really die.

A script can bounce around for ten years, twenty, forever. All it takes is one person to read it and think, where has this been all my life? One person who decides they will do anything to get this movie made. One person that others in the industry will listen to.

So when people ask how the writing thing is going, I tell ‘em about the couple projects that are, for the time being, alive. What I don’t share is all the weeks or months that go by where I don’t hear a thing. All the times I send emails or texts, nudging my producers. Asking if there’s any news. Did that actress read it? What about that list of directors I sent? Is that new financier on board or not?

When I think about it, I guess I am that dog who refuses to let go of the bone. The one who refuses to let a project stall. Someone who’s heard no a thousand times and keeps fighting.

These are my babies and there’s no one who loves them more. So I do everything I can to keep them alive. Searching for a chance. Hoping for a miracle. Luckily, I live in a town where miracles happen every day.

Is today my day?

Time will tell.

If there’s one thing I know for sure about the film & TV business, it’s this:

It’s easy to leave.

I’m not talking about the emotional cost of leaving. Or the physical reality of moving out of Los Angeles. I’m talking about the logistics of leaving show business.

You just stop doing it.

No one asks you to clean out your desk. There’s no HR department conducting an exit interview. Security doesn’t take your badge. Unless you’re on a TV show or have a deal at a studio, no one’s asking why you aren’t in the writers room or looking for snacks in the office fridge.

There’s a chance no one will notice if you’ve even left at all.

Take me for instance. I’m currently co-writing a script with Ben Rock so he would certainly know if I didn’t make one of our scheduled meetings. But when I write stuff on my own? Different story.

I don’t hear from my reps for weeks or months at a time. I guess they assume I'm writing stuff and will let them know when it’s done. No one’s calling for my availability on jobs. Because there are pretty few jobs at all. And I don’t think my reps are putting me up for Open Writing Assignments. A lot of this has to do with where I’m at the industry and also the career I’ve carved out for myself. Almost all my big wins have been scripts I’m developed from the ground up. So if I were to stop writing them, my reps wouldn’t notice for a while.

I do have two scripts with producers attached. Sometimes they call with news. Other times I call them, asking for news. But again, time passes slowly in this town so if I were gone, it might be a couple months before they realized it.

I also have a new script making the rounds. So any day, someone could maybe read it and maybe want to meet with me, and that would maybe generate contact. But that’s a lot of maybes in there.

I should stop for a moment and say this:

I haven’t left the film & TV business.

I’m still doing making a go of it. But the ease of walking away is a specter that hangs over every work day. Am I going to work or not? Because, and this is the dreamy freedom of being a screenwriter that always comes with a brutal reality:

Whether or not I show up every day is up to me.

I generally keep office hours. Monday through Friday I’m in my home office. I read, do some journaling, answer emails, waste some time on social media, and eventually I head over to my desk and get to work. Lately, it’s a mix of co-writing that script with Ben, developing new script ideas for myself to write, and writing and submitting my various fiction projects.

But again, no one says I have to do this. So why do I?

I mean, this is my chosen career. It’s paid the bills for many years, but there were years where it didn’t. I know the madness at the heart of screenwriting which is don’t do it for the money, even if it’s also your job. So taking money out of the picture:

Why do I keep going?

A short flashback before I continue: years ago, I took a workshop here in LA with an incredible teacher named Sam Christensen. His “image process” helped creative people learn to talk about themselves in a way that quickly explained the essence of who they were. Basically, Sam was teaching people to be authentic before it was even a buzzword.

He originally developed his workshop (along with his business partner Ken Cortland) as a way for actors to better communicate with headshot photographers. But it ended up working for pretty much anyone in a creative field. Dan Harmon (co-creator of Rick & Morty) was an early student and earnest champion of Sam’s work.

The workshop was a few sessions of talking about yourself in front of classmates who would mark down the words or phrase that came to mind. Then Sam and hist staff would group all this information into “neighborhoods” which were then boiled down into seven “essences” - these were the sentences that explained the very core of who you are.

If you’ve ever read one of my bios, you’ll see one of my essences at the top: “Where I come from, nice guys finish first.” That line tells you more about me than an hour over coffee ever could, trust me.

When I took the workshop, Sam believed that one of our essences was our “myth” - which he defined as the lesson people learned just being around you. Of my seven essences, this is the one Sam felt was my myth:

The Little Engine could cuz of sheer f-ing force of will.

Years after I took the workshop, Sam amended his belief and felt that everyone had a myth that could be boiled down to one word. I asked Sam what he thought my word was and he gave me a look that said, isn’t it obvious?

He said my word was “will.”

Sam and Ken have sadly both passed away but their amazing work lives on through my friends Brooke & Matt who were gifted with the right to continue teaching the Image Process at their studio in Atlanta. They have in-person workshops and virtual ones so if you’re interested, check it out here.

So back to the subject at hand:

How easy it would to be leave. How every day is haunted by the fact that no one really knows if I’m showing up and doing the work. No one but me. But I’m not leaving. And there are many reasons for that, which include:

I love what I do. I still have stories to tell. I have friends I wanna make cool shit with. And it is how I make a living (occasionally).

Sure, there’s the reality that my goals and dreams may change over time. I’m writing a lot more fiction these days, a new path that I find really interesting. And I’ve been teaching some, which I really enjoy and hope to do more of.

But every day I wake up and know, in my heart, that I’m a screenwriter. That’s my career, my vocation, and my art, all rolled up into one. And even if weeks or months or even years go by before someone thinks to ask, got anything new? That doesn’t matter.

Because I don’t go into my office for them. No one’s paying me to write (not currently anyway) so everything I’m doing is developing work for my future. A script I can sell. A project I can make. An investment in my career as a storyteller.

There’s really only one thing that gets me into that office every day:

My force of will.

And luckily, on most days, that’s enough.

Most of my screenwriting career is writing scripts on my own. Sometimes I make stuff with writer/director Ben Rock - like 20 Seconds To Live and audio shows for SHUDDER and Audible. We spent the last year and a half working on something that, very sadly, fell apart. Lately we’ve been meeting to once again face that most daunting question:

What do we do next?

Ben and I have had a tough go of it in recent years. In addition to this recent project not working out, we’ve separately had film projects stall, projects that involved rounds of notes from producers leading to lots of unpaid work. Honestly, we’re a little beat up. In addition, the entertainment industry is in a period of difficult contraction which makes getting anything made even harder than before.

We’re exhausted. But we also wanna keep making stuff together. So we’ve had some low-stress coffee meet-ups to talk about the kinds of things we might want to work on.

We keep coming back to this one idea I’ll refer to as HORROR/ACTION THING. We originally developed this as an audio show, but everyone we pitched it to said, “This sounds like a great movie!” This was right before they passed on said audio show. Some of them never even passed. They just never spoke of it again. Fun times in Hollywood, but I digress.

Ben and I still love the HORROR/ACTION THING. But what do we do with it? We laid out some options and discussed the pros and cons of each.

We could just make it as an audio show ourselves.

Pros: we actually make something.

Cons: we’d have to do it on a (much) smaller budget than we’re used to. Also, the indie audio world isn’t what it used to be. If we made and released a show on our own, can we find an audience?

We could write it as a movie script.

Pros: Making movies is what we most what to do and this idea really does sound like it’d be a great one. Plus, a paycheck for a produced screenplay far exceeds what you can make it audio.

Cons: This movie would realistically cost around $10 million and we’re not sure if anyone would let us make a movie at that budget. We might get paid and lose control of the script. Or we could get caught in development hell which means the possibility of lots of unpaid work.

We could write a different movie.

Pros: We could write something smaller-budgeted, giving us a better chance of making it ourselves.

Cons: It’s still really, really hard to make a low-budget movie. And we don’t have an idea that could be done on a budget so we’d really be starting from scratch here.

We met a few times and kept cycling through these various paths. And every time, we’d get lost in all the cons. All our worries about a world of algorithms where it’s hard to get anything indie discovered. And wanting to avoid too much free work where we’re doing tons of rewrites for producers who aren’t paying us. Worried that we’ll lose control of our project and watch someone else get to make our dream thing.

And that’s when it occurred to me. We weren’t really following our hearts here. Instead of basing our decision on what most excited us, we were basing our decision on this:

Which choice would cause us the least amount of pain?

Making, releasing, and marketing an indie project with almost no money is really, really, really hard. Writing a script and trying to get someone to pay you for it is also really hard. Taking notes from people who aren’t paying you yet is unbelievably hard.

And that’s the lesson: It’s all hard.

There is no easy path. There is no path that doesn’t have the potential to cause pain. So the question we should be asking is not, how do we avoid pain? But instead:

What’s the thing we’re so excited about that it’s WORTH the pain?

Because we all think we’re amazing and can make something so cool that it avoids the inherent pain that comes with making something in the entertainment industry. We want to believe that’s true, but it’s not.

It’s always hard. And a lot of people quit when it gets tough.

Ben and I have been doing this for 25 years or so. Not counting all the time learning our craft as young people (because let’s face it, we are no longer young). It would be easy to say, y’know, we’ve done enough. We both have a body of work, individually and together.

But there’s something about being a creative person that’s undeniable. You don’t ever wanna stop. And it can run the gamut. From gigs that pay the bills to passion projects that might earn you dozens of dollars. Sometimes you shift from one art form to another (like my recent foray into writing fiction). There are up years and down ones. Ultimately, it comes down to this:

Every day we wake up and hope for the best.

Deep in our hearts, we know the best doesn’t come easy. It comes with hard work and disappointment and often not enough money. We all have a pain threshold, what we’re willing to put up with to do the work that matters. Ben and I have a pretty high threshold, honed over years of good times and bad. But that doesn’t make it easy. It just makes it possible.

So we took out some note cards and a cork board this week and started plotting out the movie version of HORROR/ACTION THING. It felt good to put cards on the board and imagine what’s possible. To dream about making something cool with our friends where everyone makes some money and there’s no pain at all. It’s a nice dream to have.

We’ll see how much of it comes true.

Where do ideas come from?

There are books written about this. Probably entire courses taught. Lots of theories. For me, it comes down to this: stuff goes into our brains, we mix it up, and it comes out looking different. What kind of stuff? Oh you know. Everything. What we read, what we watch, what we listen to. What we feel. Especially that last one. Everything we experience is game to be remixed into something else.

When it comes to movie ideas, I have a process. Decide on my genre, come up with a list of movie stars, then brainstorm a movie for each of them. I do this five, ten, a hundred times. Most of the resulting ideas are bad. Every once in a while, there’s a good one. And then I write a script.

I started writing short stories a few year back and that’s been a lot of fun, mainly because I can’t rely on my old tricks on generating ideas. My fiction ideas generally come from prompts either in a workshop I’m taking or a themed open call for a publication I’m interested in submitting to.

Here’s an example from a story that was published a couple weeks ago. My journey to find Hollow Vision a home was a long one. Four years and sixteen rejections, to be exact. I posted about finally finding it a home and got thousands of likes across multiple platforms.

You can read the published story here.

The original idea for this one came from an open call for an anthology, meaning anyone could submit a short story with the hope of being a part of this book. The theme was described as being like Black Mirror, which is an amazing sci-fi/horror anthology show. This told me they were lookin for something that was dark, set in the near future (or today), and had some sort of tech involved.

The idea I came up with involved a young woman who finds herself haunted by a digital hologram of her dead boyfriend. But in looking back at the finished story, I can see the seeds of it in three things:

Losing my dad

I lost my dad to cancer when I was 23. It was, as you can imagine, a lot to deal with. A week or so after the funeral, I woke up in the middle of the night and could swear he was standing at the foot of my bed. I didn’t see him, but I felt him. Now I don’t know if I believe in ghosts or not, but I believe in souls and that the energy we carry for our loved ones continue on after we pass.

This became the opening image of my story, when my lead character Jax wakes up and sees the ghost of her dead boyfriend. She believes that ghosts are “bullshit” but if that’s the case, then what is standing at the foot of her bed?

What started out as a simple ghost story became a story about grief. Losing my dad was a seismic moment in my life and thirty years later, I was inspired to process it in a story. That’s often what art is, trying to make sense of something that never will.

A show from a long time ago

Before the streaming era, my favorite television mini-series of all time was Wild Palms, a near-future sci-thriller starring Jim Belushi (really). It was set in Hollywood and had all these weird cyberpunk trappings. It felt like it was totally made for me.

One of the random subplots in Wild Palms involved a technological advancement where sitcoms were shot with special cameras and then aired in people’s homes using hologram projectors. So it would look like the actors were sitting in your living room as a laugh track echoed. I always thought this was super weird and interesting.

With traditional three-camera sitcoms currently on the outs, I wondered what if there was a way to watch any show you want as holograms? So with HoloVision (the tech in my story), Jax can watch her favorite “dragon show” and see dragons flying around her living room. But the ghost of her boyfriend looked like the same kind of hologram. So what exactly is he? That’s the crux of my story and it was inspired by a show that no one probably remembers but me.

A podcast conversation between two screenwriters

I’ve always been a big fan of the screenwriting podcast Script Notes. The hosts John August and Craig Mazin are not only two of the most successful writers in Hollywood, they also have a really fun friendship that leads to interesting banter.

I remember an episode where they were discussing Final Draft (the #1 screenwriting software in the world) which is notorious for being extremely buggy. Craig talked about the reason being is that for every update, instead of creating new code from scratch, the designers would just write new code over the existing code. I have no idea if this is true or not (I know nothing about coding,) but something about that idea lodged in my mind and never left.

Late in my story, Jax is spending time with a HoloVision repairman who’s trying to help her figure out why a hologram of her dead boyfriend keeps appearing in her apartment. At some point, he talks about how he doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he does believe in code. And this is part of what he says to her:

“But more times than not, everyone’s in a hurry so they write new code over the old stuff. And if it works, you don’t notice the old code is still there, trying to do what it was written to do. It’s like every piece of technology is a living thing built on top of the ghost of what it used to be. And when something gets buggy, that’s the old code underneath trying to be heard.”

I don’t know why, but this scene is one of my favorite things I’ve written in recent years. Again, I don’t know anything about coding, but there’s something haunting in this idea and I was happy to find a place for it in my work.

And so if my short story was a meal that I cooked up, then the recipe is this: take one themed call to an anthology, add a memory brought on by grief, mix in a bit of an old TV show, sprinkle some ideas discussed on a podcast, bake for four years, and there you have it…a tasty short story that I hope will bring readers some comfort. Or sadness. Or more likely, a combination of the two.

Some follow-up

My story was rejected by the anthology for which I wrote it. It was rejected by other places, too. I was getting frustrated, but I was also realistic. My story was long (over four thousand words). It also straddles the line between sci-fi and horror, which can be a tough sell. And for a ghost story, it’s not really that scary.

A few months ago, I trimmed a few hundred words and got it down to an even four thousand. That helped, I think. Also, I found a cool publication that seems to specialize in haunting stories that straddle various genres. So if that’s your cup of tea, then for sure check out the other great stories at theworldswithin.com.

Oh, and I totally bailed on Final Draft shortly after that Script Notes episode. Fade In is now my screenwriting software of choice. As I’ve mentioned, I don’t know much about coding, I just know if something works or not, and Fade In works great.

Which makes me think about making art, in general. It’s hard to know if one’s process of coming up with ideas and executing them is the “right” way or not. All that matters is: does it work? And mine does. Not every time. Maybe one in a hundred ideas are any good. But if that’s how I code, then I can live with that.

25 years ago, I moved from Orlando do LA. It’s easily the longest I’ve lived anywhere. You make a lot of memories living in LA. The ones that tend to stick are star-sightings and strange work stories. Here are 25 random memories of my time here in no particular order:

1. My first celebrity sighting was on the day I got into town. My friend Blake picked me up at the airport and after lunch with friends, he was driving down Sunset Blvd, taking me to my new home. I was exhausted, looking out the window, when I saw a tall, charismatic man walk out of a doorway and start strolling down the sidewalk alone. Immediately, a bunch of young guys in suits bolted out the door and raced to catch up…to Jesse Jackson.

2. My first job ever in Los Angeles was a corporate gig in Palm Springs with my improv brother Will. We got there, ready to rehearse with our clients, when they said, “We run lines at the pool!” We indeed rehearsed while laying out on lounge chairs. Later, Will and I were standing waist-deep in the pool, drinking fruity cocktails, both of us with smiles that said,“This doesn’t suck.”

3. Even though I’d spent years doing improv in Orlando, I never once worked at Disney. Three weeks to the day after I moved here, I got a job at Disney California Adventure as Captain Rustworthy. I would do a one-man show for kids in front of a play area that looked like a pirate ship with water cannons kids could shoot at one another. I remember one show where all the kids charged into the play area except for one shy kid. I looked at him, in my ridiculous captain costume with lobsters on my shoulders, and said, “Get in there!” He shouted, “Yes, Captain!” and raced into the play area and happily got drenched. They paid me money to do this. It was a really fun job.

4. One day, Will and I were walking along Ventura Blvd (close to where I live now), when he glanced into an art store and said, “Leonardo DiCaprio’s in there.” So we went in and browsed posters, while listening to Leo and his model girlfriend negotiate pricing for a big order. Best quote: “Baby, we’re gonna frame this one up dope!”

5. I was pretty new to LA when I got invited to a script reading at the apartment of a writer with a famous celebrity brother. I got there early and the only other person there was a young actress from a successful indie movie that I loved. I was a bit starstruck as we chatted about our time in LA. She said she was learning how to do hair so she could pay the bills while trying to make a living as an actress. This was someone I’d seen and admired on the big screen, acting opposite big stars, but it still wasn’t a full-time gig for her. That conversation taught me a lot about what it takes to make it in LA.

6. Everyone has their 9/11 story, this was mine. After staying up all night doing post on a film I was making, I came home and got an hour of sleep before I was awakened by a call from my manager, saying there had been an attack. I woke up my roommate, who had a family member in the military, and she leapt out of bed to call her mother. I was numb for the rest of the day, and eventually ended up at my friend Rob’s place. A group of us watched O’ Brother Where Art Thou, but I couldn’t say if I liked it or not. It was the worst possible condition to watch anything, and to this day, I’ve never wanted to try watching it again.

7. Early in my career, I pitched on a feature OWA to superstar producer Mark Gordon. It was late afternoon on a Friday, and after a promising start, my pitch got bogged down in too much detail and he fell asleep in his chair. Two lessons learned: 1) never pitch late on a Friday and 2) pitch better.

8. Nearly six years to the day after moving to Los Angeles, I went into my attorney’s office to sign two Lionsgate deals: adapting an unreleased video game into a film script (along with The Air I Breathe co-writer/director Jieho Lee) AND the option agreement for my script Five Killers (which would be shot and released as Killers). That was a really good day.

9. Once I was standing in line at Office Depot and I recognized the guy in front of me. I complimented Tim DeKay on his new hit show, White Collar. He was super thankful, and asked me if I was in the business. I told him my second movie was coming out soon, and he congratulated me. We had no idea that in a few years, I would be a writer on his show.

10. I’ve always been a fan of Ken Watanabi (Batman Begins) and for a short period of time, he was attached to be in The Air I Breathe. Jieho and I drove to his office near the beach where we sat with him and his assistant, discussing his take on the character and some possible script changes. When the meeting was over, he reached over to a pretty box, tied with a ribbon, that was sitting on the table. He pulled the ribbon, and the box opened, revealing a selection of pastries. His assistant handed out plates and forks, and we all enjoyed the sweet treats. Ken would end up having to leave our movie to work with Clint Eastwood (can you blame him?) but I’ll never forget the best ending to a meeting ever.

11. I took a workshop from the late-great Sam Christensen years ago and he would host these monthly follow-ups where students would gather at his studio and Sam would chat about some interesting topic. Once I went and sat next to a blonde actress. We chatted, she was super nice. It was horror-icon Amanda Wyss, better known as Freddy’s very first victim in Nightmare on Elm Street.

12. Once I was going to Walgreens and there was a little entryway inside where I bottlenecked with a mother and her teenaged daughter. I gave them an “after you’ motion. The mom smiled at me and walked in, followed by her daughter, Ellie Fanning.

13. I was in the middle of a general meeting with a TV exec at the top of a high-rise somewhere near Culver City when an earthquake shook the building. We swayed a bit, and the exec was pretty freaked out. We were okay. Years later, she would champion a spec pilot I’d written for some producers, based on an upcoming comic book. Right after we closed the deal, but before contracts were signed, she left the company and the project died. Not even our shared earthquake experience could save that one.

14. For my second time pitching superstar producer Mark Gordon, I brought an original TV idea. This was after weeks of developing the idea with two of his top execs. It was a spy show and about two minutes into my pitch, Mark asked who were the bad guys? I paused and said sheepishly, “Bad spies?” He lectured me on what makes a good TV show and sent me on my way. I never pitched him again.

15. I’ve had exactly one director meeting where the director did not wear a shirt. I probably shouldn’t say who it was, but I’ll give you a hint: he’s a rock star who fronts a big rap-metal band from Florida. (It was Fred Durst.)

16. I developed a couple of projects with actor Topher Grace. Once he called me out of the blue to say hey. I asked where he was and he said he was in a make-up chair, covered in fake blood, in the midst of shooting Predators.

17. I ran into legendary screenwriter (and now director) Shane Black at a WGA event. I reminded him that years before, we’d hung out for a while at the Florida Film Festival. I was in the middle of this story when he said, “Excuse me, but I have to go talk to that hot girl.” He then gave me a big bear hug, and walked over and started chatting up a pretty blonde. I’ve been blown-off before at parties and events, but this will always be my favorite time.

18. During the pandemic shut-down, I was working in my office when I looked out the window and saw a dog run under my wife’s car, followed by a guy who was chasing it. We went out to see what was going on. Turns out the guy was just out walking when he saw a stray dog and had been trying to catch it for blocks. The dog took off and he raced after it. I asked my wife: “Was that the guy from Upload?” She said it was. So as Robbie Ammell gave chase, my wife got in her car and followed. She ended up helping catch the dog and we took her in for a couple days. We couldn’t find her owner, so a friend who volunteers at a local shelter helped get her adopted. And that’s the story of how my wife and Robbie Ammell saved a dog.

19. I was sitting at my local coffee bean, drinking coffee and reading a script, when two teenaged girls walked in. Suddenly, both doorways were flooded with paparazzi who took pictures as the girls ordered. A photographer leaned in, accidentally nudging me, and he politely whispered an apology. After they got their drinks, the two girls got in a car and drove away, and all the photographers hopped into multiple vehicles and followed them. It was Miley Cyrus and a friend.

20. My wife and I were in line at Aroma, one of our favorite brunch places near our home. There were only a few menus, so after we ordered, my wife took a couple and handed them to the two guys standing behind us. It was Matt Smith (post Doctor Who) and Nathan Fillion.

21. My friend Ben and I were heading to the old Sacred Fools spot on Heliotrope to see the NYE Fast & Loose show. My wife Jen was in it, and Ben’s wife Alicia was directing. The police had blocked off the street and told us there was a manhunt in the neighborhood for a murderer. We could go into the theater, but we couldn’t come out until the killer was caught. Both our wives were already in the building so what choice did we have? We went in and saw the show, having no idea if we’d have to spend the night there or not. By the time we got out, the police were gone. That means they caught the killer, right? RIGHT?!

22. Years ago, my wife’s sister visited with her husband and kids. They were only here for a couple days, but the kids really wanted to see a celebrity. We took them on a hike where we could see the Hollywood sign and on the way back down, a big dog ran up to say hello. All the kids gave him pets until his owner came up, her hair tucked under a baseball hat. She gave me a smile, and they walked off. And that’s how we all met Emily Blunt’s dog.

23. When I lived in Burbank, I remember approaching my local Starbucks and sitting outside on the patio was what looked like a middle-aged group of punk rockers having a band meeting. One of them looked me dead in the eye and I realized it was Rancid.

24. Ben and I were hired to write an episode of the Wondery horror-anthology show “I Hear Fear” which featured Oscar-nominee Carrie Mulligan as the narrator. Our challenge was creating a story about a cursed movie set that Carrie would tell as if it had actually happened to her. We never met Carrie, never had any idea of what she thought of our little tale that she passed off as true-life. The closest we got was listening to her read the credits on our episode. Her lovely voice saying, “Written by Bob DeRosa and Ben Rock” was a treat, indeed.

25. I was at the same Starbucks where I saw Rancid when Kim Shattuck (the lead singer of The Muffs) walked by. I had just seen them perform for the first time and blurted, “I have a picture of you on my phone!” She looked at the pic I took at the concert (on a FLIP PHONE), and said, “It’s blurry.” I ended up bumping into her around Burbank from time to time, and we became Facebook friends, sharing recommendations for good diner breakfasts. She was building a photography porftolio and asked to photograph me. I wore a fun band shirt and a stupid grin. I saw her perform many times over the years. I’d see her at shows and she always greeted me with a big hug (she was way tall). Tragically, she passed away from ALS a few years ago. I (and her many, many fans) miss her dearly. I was a fan but she treated me a like a friend, something I’ll never forget.

That’s 25 memories for a quarter-century. There are so many more involving my wife, our pets, our friends. Tons of theater, audio shows, meetings, jobs that fell apart, jobs that paid off. Moments where I was on top of the world, and others that broke my heart into a million pieces.

I don’t know how long I’ll be in this town, but LA will always be a part of me. Moving here changed my life for the better and I’ll always be grateful for this crowded, hot, crazy city where it seems like everyone’s a dreamer.

Sometimes this is a place where dreams come to die. Other times, it’s the land where dreams really do come true. Day to day, it’s hard to know which LA you’re getting - the dream killer or the dream creator. I lean toward the positive, I always do. But it takes a thick skin to make it in LA as a creative, for one year or twenty five.

Me, I’m heading into year twenty-six with a body of work and a hope for the future. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I recently made a post across all my social media platforms that had some of the most likes and re-posts I’ve ever received. It looked like this:

I was frankly amazed at how many people appreciated this post and were even inspired by it. Upon further reflection, I understood, because the post features two things that people like:

persistence

and

a positive outcome

This wasn’t a story about selling a script or getting a movie made. It was simply about not giving up on a short story that meant something to me and finally finding a publication that wanted it. This is not a sale, no money will exchange hands. But it’s definitely a win.

I’ve been a professional screenwriter for 20+ years, but in recent years I’ve leaned into writing more fiction. I discussed this in more detail here, but here’s the short version: I’ve been taking fiction-writing classes and workshops for a while now and started submitting stories to various magazines and online publications in 2019. I only made two submissions that year so honestly, it was really 2020 where I got serious about getting published. So that’s over six solid years of not only doing this, but keeping track of my acceptances and rejections (oh so many of those).

I wondered if it might be helpful to share the overall stats of my journey so far to write short stories and get them published. A few caveats: I’m only counting short stories (not my novel or novella) that I’ve submitted to at least one publication. I’m not counting reprints (sending out a story that’s already been published with the hope of placing it in a new publication). And I’m not counting the one story I was invited to write for the Video Palace spin-off book. So with all that in mind, here they are:

The Numbers (short story edition):

I have written and submitted 24 short stories

10 of them have been published

1 has been accepted but not published yet

8 submissions are awaiting a decision

2 stories were accepted on the first submission

Most amount of rejections before acceptance: 16

Total rejections: 116 and counting…

Some takeaways:

Rejection is unavoidable.

Over a hundred submissions led to ten stories getting published. That’s a lot of rejection. Luckily, submitting is free and done online. But that’s a lot of researching publications, formatting submissions to their specifications, sending em off, and waiting. Sometimes for months.

I submit a lot, so rejections come via email constantly. And I get it. I used to program for the Florida Film Festival so I know taste and the needs of the market in that particular moment are completely subjective. But it’s still not fun checking my email while I’m in line at the grocery store and seeing, yep, just got rejected by x publication. But sometimes there’s good news! Sometimes, but not often.

Only two stories found a home on their first try.

Listening (the first story I submitted) was initially rejected with a “revise and resubmit” offer. That means the editors like it, but thought it needed some work. They made some suggestions, I revised and resubmitted, and they accepted it. It’s available for reading (and listening!) on the wonderful site Escape Pod. Getting published there was a big win that also gave me a false sense of how easy getting stuff published was going to be.

Matched is flash fiction (under a thousand words) that was published by Every Day Fiction, the first place I sent it. It’s a great site for reading flash, and you can check out my story here. It’s also one of my very favorite stories. But another of my favorites was rejected sixteen times before it found a home. What does this tell me?

It takes as long as it takes

Getting something published is a mix of writing a good story and sending it to the right publication at exactly the right moment. Which means there’s really no gaming the system, no writing the “perfect” story that everyone will want.

It’s really just writing a lot of stories, revising them, workshopping them, reading publications, getting a sense of what they like, then sending out the stories and waiting. Usually, it’s not the right fit. Sometimes it is.

That’s pretty much it. In short:

1. write a lot

2. revise a lot

3. read a lot

4. submit a lot

Hidden within those steps are countless failed starts. Classroom exercises that go nowhere. Strange notions that spill onto a page or two before running aground. But none of that is wasted time. It’s all about searching for my voice as a fiction writer. Stumbling through the dark in search of inspiration, that idea or character or moment that spins me off into something special.

As usual, the numbers are never the whole story.

I’ll look forward to sharing my most recent acceptance when it’s finally published. In the meantime, I’m back to this:

Write. Revise. Read. Submit.

And believe.

That last one’s important. Believe it’s possible. Believe that good stories will always find a home. Believe that telling stories matters…because it does. It really, really does.

I got fired off a project a few weeks ago. The how and the why is a tale for another post. But it’s not the first time I’ve been told, “thanks, but no thanks” in this business. It’s different every time. And it’s not like a regular job where you get called into HR and given a severance package to peruse. No, it’s more like a simple phone call or email where someone says, “We’re not going to spend any more money on you.”

Here are three times in the past when it happened to me:

The Passion Project

Early in my career, I booked an Open Writing Assignment working with a hot new director to co-write his passion project. There were lots of producers involved, which made the deal-making complicated. My deal was easy, since I was a newbie, so after my reps and the studio agreed on terms, I went to work. Five days a week I drove to the director’s office, and we worked together breaking the story.

Still, the deal-making lagged and I wasn’t getting paid until ALL the deals were done. I worked for free for three months. Every once in a while, my manager at the time would call and tell me not to go to work as leverage to try and get me paid. Then when he felt my check was imminent, he’d tell me it was okay to go back into work.

Meanwhile, the development process was slow-going for a couple reasons: A) The director’s dream project was super-complicated and ambitious and B) I was a new writer without the experience needed to wrangle those ambitions into a story that worked. It was a grueling three months where we did our best, but it wasn’t really coming together.

During one of my “breaks,” the director called me and told me I was fired. He said it nicer than that, but that was the gist. I was secretly relieved. It was not a fun time. And I still hadn’t been paid a buck. Luckily, the studio knew they owed me something, so they hired me to write another script for them. To this day, that director’s passion project remains unmade.

The Competition

Once a writer/director friend and I were hired to adapt a piece of IP (intellectual property) into a script. They wanted something kickass but budget-friendly. We pitched a lean, mean version of this action-packed property with my director friend attached to direct.

After our deals closed, we were told there was another writer hired to script a completely different version of the same IP. His was a wildly expensive take with some cool ideas for high-tech gadgets. The studio’s feeling was that they’d shoot our script, but incorporate some of the other writer’s ideas into the movie. Halfway through the process we began to realize, no, we were competing with the other project.

And we lost. The studio picked the wildly expensive script. The only upside is we had a two-step deal, meaning they owed us a fee for a rewrite. They didn’t want us to rewrite the other guy’s script, so they paid us for doing nothing. It’s the only time in my career that’s ever happened, where a studio essentially said, “We’re not going to spend any more money on you…wait, your deal says what? Fine, we’ll spend a little more money on you, but then it’s over, we mean it!”

It took the sting out a bit, but not by much. Getting fired sucks, even if they grease your exit with some extra cash.

The Replacement

The writing, selling, and subsequent studio development of my script Five Killers (which would eventually be released as Killers) is a very long story that I should get into one of these days. Long story short, Lionsgate optioned the script and I did revisions for two different directors. Lionsgate’s leadership shifted during that process (which lasted a couple of years) so by the time I turned in my final draft, it was my last, best opportunity to stay on the movie.

I remember going to my local grocery store and as I was walking toward the front doors, my director called me and told me I was being replaced. He explained that it happens all the time on big studio movies and proceeded to list a murderer’s row of extraordinary writers who’d been fired off of projects before. Literally, everyone has. Now it was my turn.

For the first time in my career, I was going to be rewritten. And as it turned out, by some of the biggest writers in Hollywood. I traded emails with a couple of them, they were all very gracious. And that director who made that incredibly generous call? He left the project later for his own reasons. I didn’t meet Rob Luketic, who ended up directing the movie, until the premiere. He was also very gracious. Everyone was, really.

It’s one of the weird things about this business. People are nice to you when they love you and want to be in business with you. They’re also nice to you when they fire you. I was lucky I got the call. Some writers find out they’ve been replaced on a project when they read about it in the trades.

This business is brutal. Nice…but brutal.

Afterward

Getting fired sucks, no matter what you do for a living. But writing a script is like birthing a baby (less screaming, I imagine, but only a little), and it really sucks when someone says we’re taking your baby, here’s your paycheck, goodbye.

They say success is the best revenge, but is it really? Because I went on after being fired and sold other things and made movies and never have I ever bumped into someone who did the firing and been able to point at my credits and go SEE, look at what you missed out on! Because honestly, everyone who’s fired me has probably been fired too at some point. Everyone’s just working on their own stuff, trying to figure it all out.

A screenwriting career means having to be okay with getting hired and fired, having projects come together only to fall apart. People have lied to me, lied about me, talked shit, but also some have laid sincere compliments at my feet that I will never forget.

The one thing I have to remember, time and time again, is that it’s not personal. Even when it feels like it.

When I first moved to LA, nearly 25 years ago, I had the same dreams that many new screenwriters have. I wanted to sell a script for a bunch of money. Work with movie stars. Walk the red carpet at a premiere for a movie I wrote. And here’s the thing:

My dreams came true.

Not all at once. But over time, I checked all those boxes. It felt really good.

So I started coming up with new dreams. I wanted to create a hit TV show. Start a production company with my first manager. Walk the stage at the Eccles Theater (the biggest venue at the Sundance Film Festival) with the cast & crew of a movie I wrote.

Well.

My TV career crashed and burned. My relationship with my first manager crashed and burned. And as for the Eccles? Well, this is gonna be the last ever Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT. Next year, the fest moves to Boulder, Colorado. I’m sure there will be some Eccles-like venue there and someday, if I’m very fortunate, maybe I’ll get to go there with a movie I’ve written.

But that very specific dream I had of doing a Q&A at the Eccles is never gonna happen. I’ll never get to explain how when I was scouting movies for the Florida Film Festival back in the day, I would sit in the Eccles audience and dream of being on stage. I’ll never give a shout-out to everyone in the upper balcony seating, which is where I always used to sit. Sitting up there felt like an insider secret, an easy way to get a seat with a good view, even though you’d never get to ask a question during Q&A’s because who looks up there? Well, I woulda. But alas, not to be.

As dying dreams go, that’s a pretty small one. But I feel time passing. Sundance is moving. The film business is contracting. The whole world feels like it’s shifting.

Maybe some will say, hey, I had some dreams come true. Give someone else a shot. That’s fair. We all have dreams, and honestly, I believe there’s enough space for all of them to come true. But what often happens is people realize that pursuing dreams is hard work. Choices get made. Things are prioritized. Life gets in the way.

And honestly, dreams change over time.

Back in Orlando, I used to dream of being a writer/director. But that dream changed when I realized writing is where my heart was. When my comedy troupe THEM was enjoying a lot of success, we used to dream of getting our own TV show. We took some shots, but it never panned out.

When I look back, I realize my dreams have been constantly evolving. Now I’m older, with more than a couple wins under my belt. And my dreams are different now.

I’d love to make a movie with my often-collaborator Ben Rock. And have my play Gifted performed in cities around the world. And now that I’m writing fiction, I dream of going on a book tour and seeing my book for sale in far-away bookshops.

Dreaming is one of the things that makes us human. We aspire. We long for things. We can dream of a better world for us, the people we love, for everyone really.

I’ll never stop dreaming. Not until my last breath. And when times are tough and it feels like nothing’s working out, I’ll pick a dream that came true. A good one.

And remind myself that anything is possible.

Like when we wrapped production on The Air I Breathe. It was a crazy last day. We showed up in downtown Mexico City for a street shoot, only to find that they’d paved the streets that day and we couldn’t shoot right away. So we adjusted, shot some other stuff. Eventually, we got the street shot we needed and when my co-writer/director Jieho called cut for the last time, a party broke out. Everyone was so happy. Brendan Fraser hugged me and said, “Thanks for writing a great script, man!” I was in a daze. I looked over at my manager CP, who was a producer on the film.

“Your dream came true,” he said, softly.

“What do you mean?”

“When you first moved to LA, I asked what your dream was. And you said, you wanted a movie star to thank you for writing a great script. And it just happened.”

I didn’t even remember having that dream. But it was a moment I’ll never forget. And a great reminder. Dreams come true.

Even on the freshly paved streets of Mexico City.

In trading emails with a writer friend recently, I did the normal writer catch-up thing which was to give a quick summary of what I’ve been working on. I shared that I was still screenwriting, querying agents with my first novel, co-writing a new audio show, and getting some short stories published (like this one!). He commented on how nice it was receiving a message from a fellow writer who seemed to be thriving.

This made me chuckle. Thriving? No, I wouldn’t call it that. If I’m doing anything right now it’s this:

Sustaining.

In case you haven’t heard, the entertainment industry is in a tough spot. Covid hammered the theatrical experience. Followed by dual strikes. Streaming upended all the reliable business models. Tech companies took over the studios with their “cut any cost and sacrifice anything for growth” mentality. AI is a big threat with no sign of going away. And mass consolidation among the surviving studios is just getting started.

What’s that look like on the ground? Most everyone I know isn’t working. Anyone who is working is generally keeping it to themselves. I suspect there’s some survivor’s guilt at play. Or maybe everyone just sees the writing on the wall. “Sure, I’m working but for how long?”

My business model has been pretty consistent. Get as many irons in the fire as possible and hope one or more pays off. But that’s becoming a tougher path to sustain.

I have one script with attachments that could go in the next year or so. I had two other active projects but they’re pretty dead now (how and why is a tale for another post). I have a new script that will go out to producers early next year. I’m co-writing an audio show (the only real paycheck I’ve seen recently). I’m trying to get an agent for my novel but that could take a very long time. And I did get four short stories accepted for publication this year, which is really cool, but those don’t pay anything.

So even though I’m doing this full time, I’m barely earning a living. Sure, there are plenty of irons in the fire. Stuff that could pay off next year. Or the year after. Or never. How can I do this? The answer is I’m very, very lucky. I was able to buy a house when the market was at its lowest, and so we live in a neighborhood I could never afford to buy in today. Past jobs provide occasional residuals and enabled me to build up some savings. And my wife is having a super busy year as a freelance designer.

But I don’t feel like I’m thriving.

I feel like I’m holding onto my career by my fingernails. Waiting for…I don’t know what. Everyone’s wondering when the business will get back to normal. But what if this is the new normal? This feeling that the ground is shaking under our feet and might never stop…what if it never stops? Or when it does stop, we won’t recognize the landscape anymore.

I still love movies. The kind of movies I love to write (mid-budget genre pics) are largely gone. Am I being stubborn? Should I change what I write to match where it seems like the industry’s heading? That’s always a recipe for disaster. By the time you sniff out a new trend, it’s already shifting to something else. And writing into trends often results in really bland work (at least for me).

Should I pivot fully into writing fiction? The publishing industry is having its own existential crisis. And I’ve had some small wins in that world, but nothing that looks like a career. This is definitely a future pivot but not a reliable path today.

So what to do?

Keep showing up. Write new stuff. Ship it. Repeat. Make cool shit with people I love. Keep putting irons in the fire. Maybe nothing will connect. Or maybe something will. I can’t see the future. I can’t really guess where the industry is heading. All I know is that every once in a while, I write something that people like and it changes my life for the better.

That’s the path I’ve bet on for the entirety of my 20 + year career. It may not be perfect, but it’s the only path I know. And for now at least, that’s the one I’m sticking with.

“Essentially, sustaining is about stability, whereas thriving is about flourishing and maximizing potential.”

Sometimes writing is about being inspired. An idea comes like a lightning bolt in the middle of the night (or more often the shower) and all you can think is, I’ve gotta sit down and write that.

But more often than not, writing is setting a goal and strategizing a way to accomplish it. Things like, I’m gonna write a new script this year. I have to finally finish that novel. Or there’s a mystery I need to solve, which is this:

Why haven’t I published a short story in nearly two years?

I’ve been taking a writing classes and writing short stories for a while now. Starting in 2020, I was getting one or two published every year. I’m a modestly organized person, especially when I’m tackling a new goal, so I kept a spread sheet of the stories I wrote, the publications I submitted them to, and the results.

2024 was the first year since I started where nothing I sent out was accepted. This was a huge bummer. I had to find out why. The answer wasn’t very surprising.

I wasn’t been writing much new stuff. Much of what I was submitting were stories that had been rejected by other publications. There are many resources for finding places to submit, based on the length and genre of your story. I use Duotrope. I noticed that almost every single publication suggests reading their stuff before submitting to get an idea of their taste. I honestly wasn’t doing much of that, as most of my spare reading time was spent working on my annual goal of reading 40 books.

My strategy was pretty simple. Take a class, leave with a couple new stories, submit those stories to places I found on Duotrope. And hope. But it clearly wasn’t working.

Something had to change.

So at the beginning of this year, I created a new strategy.

1. Write more stories.

2. Submit more stories.

3. Read more short story publications.

My screenwriting career is all about generating new ideas. But for some reason, I never come up with short story ideas. I need some sort of structure with deadlines and prompts to get my brain working. Classes help, but they cost money and I only leave with a story or two. Late last year I came upon a website that seemed to offer exactly what I needed (since it was right there in the name): deadlinesforwriters.com.

The site is a private writing group that offers different classes and challenges. The one I zeroed in on is a free challenge called 12 Stories in 12 Months. It’s as simple as it sounds: every month there’s a word prompt (to inspire a creative idea) and a required word count. Then on a specific day of the month, you post your story on a private site (so it doesn’t count as being published.)

This really worked for me. Since I started last year, this month’s posting will be my twelfth story in twelve months. I’ve NEVER written that many short stories in a year. Not all of them are winners, but as you’ll see below, at least of couple of them were.

But just writing stories isn’t enough. I had to revise them and submit more. I started a fiction writing group a few months ago which helped give me deadlines and feedback from an amazing community of smart writers. I started submitting more, trying to get all my available stories out to at least three publications apiece (I focus on markets that allow simultaneous submissions so I’m not just waiting for one market to decide on my story, which can take months). I submitted new stories as well as old ones, including some that I dearly loved even though they’d been rejected multiple times.

But I had to do more than just scour Duotrope for available markets. I decided to take the advice that every publication offers and read what they had to offer. Again, it helped to set a goal. For this year, it was this:

Read a new publication every month.

And not just one or two stories. If they had a recent issue, I would download it and read it cover to cover. If they were an online-only publication, I would read all of their recent stories. The point was to get a sense of not only the genre they preferred, but crucially their tone. Some genre publications like humor. Others don’t. Some like stories that are dialogue-driven. Others prefer them atmospheric with a strong use of language.

As of October, I’ve researched thirteen new markets (more than one a month). And did these new habits pay off?

Well, in a two week span in September, I “sold” three stories! I say sold, but these are non-paying publications. Still, I got three yeses after a couple years of straight rejection. And this week I got another acceptance. That’s four stories already this year!

In case you want to check them out, here are links and details to the accepted stories:

“Fair Fight” was published at 365 Tomorrows which specializes in science fiction under 600 words. This is a fun story about an unwinnable war against an alien invasion that I wrote for the 12 Stories in 12 Months challenge, and the prompt was “futile.”

“Resort Satisfaction Questionnaire” was published in the Fall issue of The Genre Society. It’s an online magazine, just flip to page 28 to check out my story. It’s one of my faves about a guy who answers one of those email questionnaires about his stay in a fancy resort and it becomes apparent from his answers that he was there during a zombie outbreak. This one’s funny as well as bloody and it took a while to find the right home. But when researching The Genre Story, I found their stories had a similar tone and I thought this might be a good fit. Turns out I was right.

“Bad Business” is a dark little crime story that was published online at Guilty Crime Mag. This was also written during the 12 Stories in 12 Months challenge and the prompt was “loyal.”

As for my fourth story that was just accepted, I’ll have to wait until that one’s online but the title alone is one of my favorite things ever so can’t wait!

So there you have it. Zero stories published in 2024. Four stories accepted in 2025. I’m already thinking about how I’m going to adjust my strategy for next year.

Inspiration is awesome. But so is setting goals and strategizing a way to accomplish them. Sometimes (often) it doesn’t come together. But every once in a while it does.

None of these short story wins put a dollar in my pocket. But it just feels good to get something out there. Hopefully, some readers will enjoy them. And there are four new magazine editors who took a chance on my stuff. That feels good, too.

Screenwriting is still my career. Audio fiction is my occasional part-time gig. But fiction writing is a lot of fun and who knows? If I keep this up, I might just strategize my way into a new career someday.

There is a post I used to share on Twitter once a year or so. Then I left that hell-site and now the post is pinned on my bluesky page. It reads:

My screenwriting career by the numbers:

I've written 38 feature scripts

Made money on 10

4 were assignments

2 were optioned but never sold

1 was sold but never made

3 were sold and made

2 out to financiers with attachments

New script out to producers

Currently writing #39

There are no shortcuts!

I write a lot of things. Feature screenplays, TV pilots, audio dramas, plays, and more recently fiction. But feature scripts have always been the cornerstone of my career. Here are some definitions for the non-screenwriters out there:

Assignments (AKA Open Writing Assignments or OWA’s) are when someone (usually a studio) is looking to hire a writer. It can be to adapt a piece of IP (intellectual property) such as a book or a video game. It can also be to rewrite an existing script. Before I moved to LA (and I wasn’t in the Writers Guild), an indie producer hired me to write a script for her. All the rest of my OWA’s have been for studios.

Options are when a production company or studio pays a small fee to give them exclusive rights (for a set period of time, usually a year) to market my script, in the hope they can attach a director and actors (AKA attachments) and find financing. If they can put those elements together (also known as “packaging”), then they can purchase the script and make the movie. This is how all three of my produced movies came together.

I co-wrote script #38 with my often partner-in-crime Ben Rock. I’ve co-written a total of 9 feature scripts, but this is the first one I’ve written with Ben. We also co-wrote two audio dramas and co-created the horror/comedy web-series 20 Seconds to Live. We’re currently in negotiations to co-write a new audio drama.

Since this initial post, I finished a first draft of script #39. It took me a while to crack this particular story and I’m still not sure I have. But at least I have something with a beginning, middle, and end. I’m currently working on a second draft.

Which brings me back to the final line of my post:

There are no shortcuts.

Occasionally someone will reach out to me on social media with some version of, “I just wrote my first script, how do I sell it?” And my answer is usually write five more scripts.

We love the idea of shortcuts. We love stories of how someone wrote their first script and sold it for a million bucks. Or how someone’s first script won them an Oscar. Everyone wants to win the lottery. But almost no one ever does.

What happens, usually, is people work hard for a long time and when luck and perseverance meet, then sometimes good things happen.

I’ve written 39 scripts, made money on 10. That means there are 29 scripts that haven’t sold. Some of them may sell someday. If I’m lucky, maybe a couple will get made. But I can’t count on that. At the very least, I know those 29 unsold scripts taught me something. About the craft. Or about myself. They certainly reinforced that there are no shortcuts in this business.

I never want to discourage anyone from trying to tackle a creative endeavor. If you want to try screenwriting, get in there. You can go to film school, but you don’t have to. There are plenty of free or accessible resources to learn the craft. The business is a mess, but hopefully movies and TV will survive and thrive.

But if you’re doing it to get rich or famous, then please do something else. It takes a lot of time. A lot of drafts. A lot of falling down and learning to get back up. There are no shortcuts. But there is a way through, if you’re willing to do the work.

The numbers don’t lie.

My favorite new podcast is Past Due with Ana Marie Cox and Open Mike Eagle. They talk frankly with their guests about how hard it is to make a living while working as a creative. I posted how much I liked the show on Bluesky, they saw my “by the numbers” post, and invited me to be on the show to talk about it.

This is one of my favorite podcast interviews ever. I talk about the ups and downs of my 20-year-plus screenwriting career, how I wrote my way out of a six-year slump, and the (ongoing) struggle to reignite my career when others might have packed it in. Really proud to be a part of this conversation.

So if you enjoy what I write here on my Substack and want to hear me talk more about it with two amazing hosts, give it a listen.

And thank you for the encouraging messages I get here from time to time. It means the world getting to share with all of you.

A year or so after I moved to Los Angeles, I stumbled into Sacred Fools Theater Company in Hollywood. It was a company filled with energetic actors & artists looking to make cool stuff. I ended up writing on and off there for nearly 20 years - mostly insane late night serials and 24-hour theater. It was a membership company, and my wife and I were invited to join a while back. We made a lot of friends and a lot of art.

During the pandemic shut-down, Sacred Fools closed the membership portion of their company. The how and why are better left to spirited debates at our favorite theatre bar. The company still exists, making cool theater, but nearly a hundred of us are no longer members. We essentially lost our creative home. This was an upsetting development for more than a few of my friends.

I feel like I’ve handled it okay, mainly because I’m at the age where I can look at that portion of my life and see it for what it was:

An amazing chapter that came to an end.

Life is full of chapters. Most people measure them in normal ways. High school. College. Career. Marriage. Kids. Then their kids’ chapters.

I have landmark life stuff too, but when I look at my chapters, I see creative endeavors, partnerships, eras.

In college and the years after, I made short films with my buddies Ken & Greg. We won some awards, had a ton of fun. Tried to get a couple features made. Eventually, life took us in separate directions, mine being a move to LA. We’re still buds and reunited a few years ago at Greg’s newest chapter as the proprietor of Sanford, Florida’s first (and finest) microbrewery Wop’s Hops. My chapter making indie movies with Ken & Greg overlapped with another chapter:

Ten years with my sketch & improv comedy troupe THEM. We did weekly shows, toured the Canadian Fringe circuit, and booked some crazy corporate gigs. After we all moved to LA, we did monthly shows for a year or so before taking a break. We never performed as a troupe again. My THEM chapter is over, but it was hugely influential for me, and those guys are still my brothers. One of them, Rob, recently asked me to do a 2-man improv storyteller show with him for a fantastic charity event that his wife Jenni helps run. Now we put on goofy costumes a couple times a year and make some deserving kids smile. We look like this:

My first chapter in Hollywood was marked by a nearly 10-year collaboration with my first manager CP. We made two movies together, and I learned so much about storytelling and surviving in this crazy business. But that chapter ended and we no longer work together.

My chapter as a TV writer was short. One season on White Collar. A few pilots, lots of meetings. But that chapter ended fast.

Then there was the chapter that inspired this substack, the chapter where I didn’t work for six years. Well, I worked, but no one paid me for that work. It was awful. One of the things that got me out of that funk was my current chapter:

Making stuff with my friend Ben Rock. In addition to all the crazy theater we did together at Sacred Fools, we also made an award-winning web-series and co-wrote (and Ben directed) two audio dramas (one for SHUDDER, another for Audible). We’re in negotiations now to co-write a third audio drama so hopefully this chapter still has a ways to go.

In addition to this impending audio gig, I also have two feature scripts in active development and a novel out there, too.

Maybe this is the chapter where I balance writing movies, audio, and fiction.

And if so, then maybe this chapter’s just getting started. But that’s the tricky thing about chapters. It’s hard to know when you’re in one and it’s impossible to know how long they’ll last. And you’ll never know what they really mean to you until you have some distance from them.

I find comfort in looking at my life in chapters. It helps lessen the sadness and nostalgia of great times gone by. I will never forget the summer I spent driving across Canada in a barely-working van doing comedy with my best friends. I also know that chapter is way over. I will not be sleeping on a stranger’s floor anytime soon after knocking out a sketch show for beer money. But I’m glad I can look back on that chapter with fondness. All of the chapters bring comfort, even the tough ones. I know I can dig my career out of a pit because I did it once before. I hope to never have to do that again, but we’ll see.

Which brings me to the world as a whole right now. We’re living through a political nightmare. A lot of people I care about are really scared. The dangers of climate change hit harder every year. Then there’s AI, tech oligarchs, and whatever crypto-bullshit that’s getting sold this week. It’s all too much.

It’s a chapter we’re all living through together.

I hope there’s a time in the not-too distant future when we look back and see this as a moment when fear and greed seemed to be winning. A moment that turned, like a page, to a new chapter where we reconnect as a world with our compassion and common-sense. It’s easy for me to say this, I know. Some people don’t have that much time. They may not get to see a better chapter. And that’s one of the toughest things about life:

We don’t know how much time we have.

So it’s important to live now. To connect now. Make art now.

My wife’s currently in a show at the Hollywood Fringe, a month-long theater festival with hundreds of shows, much of it set around the Broadwater Theater (our old Sacred Fools home). I’ve been down there a decent amount, seeing shows, reconnecting with old friends. It’s giving me that theater itch. It’s been years since I wrote anything new for the stage. Maybe it’s time to reconnect with that part of myself. My chapter as a member of Sacred Fools may be over.

But my chapter as a writer who makes cool shit with my friends is ongoing.

And I have to admit, it’s nice seeing a Fringe show and then coming home to sleep in a big bed instead of on someone’s floor.

Some chapters (or at least parts of them) are best left in the past.

I spent a pretty fantastic day at the LA Times Festival of Books recently. It’s like Comic Con for book nerds held outdoors on the USC campus with indoor panels featuring tons of amazing writers. I saw three panels this year and when it came time for the audience to ask questions, I heard the same question throughout the day:

What advice would you give yourself when you were just starting out?

I hear this question often at panels and I really love it. It’s better than the overarching “What’s the best piece of writing advice ever?” which usually ends up with someone shaking their head and saying, “Just write.”

Instead, imagining the advice you’d give yourself makes it personal. And the unsaid part of this question, and the reason I love it, is what’s really being asked is this:

How did you fuck up?

Because face it, every writer has said “wow, I wished I’d done THAT better.” Or wished they’d avoided that slow-motion car crash that everyone but us saw coming. Or imagined that the industry and our career in it would operate in a certain way and boy, were we wrong.

I’ve written my basic “getting started as a screenwriter” advice before which boils down to this:

1. Write great scripts

2. Meet great people

3. Make great stuff

Easier said than done, I know but you can read a more detailed explanation on why that’s the advice I give new writers here.

But to be completely honest, I wouldn’t give that advice to my past self because I was already doing that stuff. And it worked out! I wasn’t brilliant or anything, I just followed my gut, made awesome friends, worked hard, and got really lucky in so many ways.

So when I think about the advice I’d give my younger self, it wouldn’t be the me just starting out. Instead, I think of the advice I would give to the me who had his first professional win. The me who just went pro and was screenwriting full time - THAT guy needed some help. Because he made mistakes. Not Earth-shattering, but still…I fucked up a lot.

So here are the three things I wish I could tell “past me” (in chronological order):

1. The moment you sell your first thing in Hollywood, start writing something new because by the time you finish the new thing, your first pro deal will finally close.

My first win in Hollywood was selling a pitch to Revolution Studios to write an original “romantic fantasy” script. I was elated. I quit my freelance gig flying around doing comedy shows at stockbroker conventions (fore real) which now that I think about it, is my sub advice to my younger self: DON’T quit the sweet gig doing fun shit with my friends that paid really well and didn’t take up too much time until I absolutely had to. But that’s another blog post.

Instead, I did a lot of free theater because what the hell, I was about to be a paid screenwriter so might as well have fun for a little while.

My deal took three months to close.

You can do a lot in three months. You can write a new script. You can fly around doing fun comedy shows. You can do tons of free theater. I only did the latter unfortunately. And after three months, when my deal closed and I got to work, only then did it occur to me - “Hmm, I guess I kinda wasted a bunch of time waiting for my deal to close.”

Nowadays, most writers don’t make that mistake because deals take WAY longer to close, many many months, even years. So if anyone reading this sells something anytime soon, take a night, have a nice meal with a loved one, maybe get away for a weekend to celebrate. Then on Monday morning - start the next thing.

The second piece of advice I could give my younger self is this:

2. General meetings, developing pitches for open writing assignments, and pitch meetings are part of the job of writing, but never forget - writing is the job.

When you sell your first thing in Hollywood, everyone wants to meet you. It’s really nice doing the water bottle tour (which I talked about here). You’ll go up for OWAs (open writing assignments). Developing pitches for those OWAs take time. You have to figure out the pitch, practice it with your reps, take the meeting. If you’re not careful, a year goes by and you haven’t sold anything and you haven’t written anything new. Then all of a sudden, you have less meetings. Less OWAs coming your way. Your momentum is fading so you need a new script to get it going again. A script you haven’t started yet.

I feel like this lesson has been presented to me again and again. Never more so than in my year after working on White Collar. I had just signed with a new manager and was out pitching a new idea for a TV show and taking general meetings with studio execs, hoping they’d consider me for staffing jobs.

I spent that year meeting everyone and came close on a couple things. But nothing sold, and I didn’t get staffed on another show. My TV sample had already been seen by everyone - it was what got me my job on White Collar. All of a sudden, I’d spent a year not getting work and not writing a new sample. That began a six year stretch where I didn’t work at all. It sucked. And it could’ve been avoided if I remembered advice #2 which leads nicely into advice #3:

3. Write something new every year

And by this I mean write something new every year and send it out so people in the industry know you are still in the industry. It really is that simple. Memories are short. People get busy. They may remember that script you wrote a couple years ago. But time passes and they will forget you ever existed.

I can’t take credit for this advice, I’ve heard it from many writers, including Eric Heisserer (Arrival). Early in his career, he was writing a lot of horror remakes like A Nightmare on Elm Street. He told his reps that no matter how much work they got him, he was going to write a new script every year. And you know, his career turned out okay (huge understatement, he’s a total rock star).

I still forget this advice. It’s been a couple years since I’ve had a new screenplay written by just me to remind people…yes, I’m alive. I’ve written a book that’s out to agents, got a movie released, and my partner-in-crime Ben Rock and I have a deal on the table to write something new. All of that is awesome. But nothing beats having a brand new script that people can get excited about.

Getting started is hard.

Selling that first thing is really hard.

Keeping a career going after that is possibly the hardest.

I guess another way to look at advice I’d share with my younger self is by calling them “lessons learned.”

And like most lessons, I’ve learned them the hard way.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were on a plane, heading to Mexico to attend a destination wedding. We were looking forward to celebrating an amazing couple and reconnecting with a bunch of friends.

It was also the exact day when a decision maker at a big company was going to decide whether or not to buy a project that I would co-write with my often partner-in-crime Ben Rock. Just getting to this point was a huge deal. I was about to see a ton of friends, and I was wondering what I’d say when I got the inevitable, “What’s up?”

Because there’s one thing about show business that never gets any easier:

It’s hard to know when to share good news.

This biz is filled with rejections. An endless sea of nos, really. You look for a manager or agent. Plenty say no thank you. Until someone signs you. Then they send out your new script. So many people pass. Until someone likes it and wants to meet you. Hopefully you take a lot of meetings. You find a producer who wants to “develop” the script. That’s code for free rewrites. You do the rewrites because you love the thing and you want it to get made. But with the every draft comes the inherent question: is it ready now? The answer is often no.

Until it’s finally a yes. Then your producer sends it out to directors. Most of them say no. Finally one says yes. Then there are more rewrites. Is the script ready? No, of course not. Eventually, it is. Then you send it out to actors. So many actors. So many nos. Maybe someone says yes. Maybe someone else does, too. A financier needs to say yes. A studio, too. Not always in that order. It’s different every time. But the nos are constant. And if you’re lucky, the yeses come, too.

But which of those yeses do you share with your friends? When do you take a victory lap and celebrate or have a nice dinner with a loved one?

Really, there are only two times:

When you’re paid. As in, yes the check cleared.

And when the thing you’ve made gets released. As in, yes, please go see or stream or download my new thing.

Every other yes is a chance to feel good, to feel like this is all building toward something. Yes a producer read it and loved it. Yes a director read it and wants to meet. Yes a famous actress is reading it this weekend. All those are yeses. But none pay the bills. And none mean a damn thing to your mom in Florida who just wants to know when she can buy the Blu Ray from Amazon.

But we have to take our wins when we can get them because they come along so rarely. So we share other yeses with a big ol’ asterisk. Yes, something good happened*

*but it all could go away tomorrow.

That’s what trying to make a living in this industry is like. Floating in a sea of nos, desperately holding onto a yes and hoping it’ll keep you above water, not knowing if it’s a life raft that’s leaking air because sometimes a yes in this industry actually means, meh, not really.

So you float and hold on and just try to get to the next yes. And to the next one. Hoping you’ll eventually make it to the dry land that is getting paid and getting the thing made.

The news I was waiting for upon landing in Mexico was neither of those things. It was simply, does someone with the power to say sure, let’s do this…well, do they say that?

It was near the end of the flight that I realized I had access to text messages (thanks, Alaska Air). I turned on my phone and it blew up with texts. We’d gotten an answer.

It was a yes.

Not the kind of yes that pays the mortgage or allows my mom to go buy the thing at Target. But a yes that could keep us afloat for a little while. A piece of good news that said someone likes a story we want to tell and hopefully they’ll pay us to tell it.

It’s good news for sure. A yes that hopefully will lead to many more yeses. But for now, I think it’s worth sharing.

Because at this moment in time, any good news is great news indeed.

There’s a strange truth about doing business in Hollywood:

The more successful you are, the less you need a website.

I’ve never gone to a celebrity’s website to see what they’re up to. I read the announcements in the trades (such as Variety or Hollywood Reporter). If you want to hire Tom Cruise, you don’t go to his website. You call his agent.

Bill Murray doesn’t even have an agent. He has a voice mail. If you’re interested in hiring him, you call and leave a message. Maybe he calls you back and stars in your movie. Maybe he doesn’t. He for sure calls Wes Anderson back. Everyone else - who knows?

There’s also imdb.com (the internet movie data base) which is the go-to for keeping track of everyone’s credits. If there’s a screenwriter I like and I want to see what they’re written, I can go to imdb and look up their credits, see what they have in development. If you have a pro account, you can look up the contact info for producers, agents, managers.

I’ve never really needed a website. I figure if someone was curious about working with me, they could find my imdb page or contact my reps.

To be honest, screenwriters that have websites are either at the beginning of their career, trying to “break in,” or they’re focused on teaching. But in my research, I’ve learned there’s a type of writer that definitely needs a website, no matter if they’re famous or not:

Novelists.

Pretty much every novelist has a website and it is the center of their universe. It lists all their books and how to buy them as well as public events, classes they may be teaching, or services they may offer (such as manuscript editing). It acts as home base, connecting their body of work to their social media presence. It seems to me that if you want to be a successful novelist, you must have a website.

This is new territory for me. I’ve had blogs through the years and the occasional internet newsletter. Substack has been really fun and in my mind this blog has taken the place of posting on Twitter (which I finally fled after many years).

But now I have to face facts. I’ve a working screenwriter that also writes and produces audio dramas with a fiction-writing practice that I hope someday soon will become a part-time job if not a full-time career. So I faced my complete lack of design-skills, got a subscription to squarespace, and put something together:

bobderosa.com

As you can see, it’s very simple. Bio, images for my produced credits, links to some short stories I’ve published, basic contact info. And it brings people here, to the platform where I feel best sharing my thoughts on a middle-class screenwriting career. I’m also at bluesky if you wanna come say hi.

There’s so much to balance in having a creative career. Figuring out our voice, establishing a brand, zeroing in on a medium or two (or three), creating and promoting a body of work. Making a living. And the reality of the modern world is we need a home base online.

My site feels a bit like a placeholder for the moment. It’ll grow in importance once I start publishing more in the fiction world. For now, I doubt it’s a place people will return to on a regular basis. It’s more like a hand-shake hello and an invitation to come here and sit down for a chat. Which you’ve already done.

Thanks for being ahead of the curve. I look forward to many more chats to come.

I wrote my first short story at the age of six.

I wrote short stories throughout middle school and into high school.

I tried writing my first novel in high school and thought, this is too hard. I don’t wanna describe all this stuff, I just wanna write action and dialogue.

And a fledgling screenwriter was born.

Many years later, I became a working screenwriter. But more than once, I would tell a friend:

“Someday I’ll retire and just write books.”

One day it occurred to me…I should probably write a book now and make sure I like it.

I decided to start small and write a short story. I hadn’t done that since high school. How hard could it be? So I did what I always do. I added it to my annual to-do list. Heh. After two years of not writing a short story, I changed my strategy.

I took a class.

I signed up for “Art of the Short Story” which was presented by Writing Workshops LA (which is now sadly defunct). My classmates and I would meet in our teacher’s house in Pasadena, have some wine and cheese, and workshop our stories. It was refreshing to be a student again in a room full of writers who were better read than me and get this…no one was talking about their screenplays. I was in heaven. I took the same class with a different teacher the following year. The students in that second class got along so well that all seven of us formed a writers group, meeting once a month to workshop our stories (and drink wine).

Then Covid happened and I took my third class via Zoom. That teacher had a thousand-words-per-week writing requirement which caught me off guard. I thought about writing a short story every week but I remembered this cool idea for a grounded sci-fi thriller that I pitched my manager as a script. He wasn’t a fan of the idea so I shelved it. But maybe it could be a book, I thought. I ended up writing and workshopping three chapters in that class.

In November 2020, I continued the story with fifty thousand more words as a part of an online challenge led by an organization that I won’t name here. You can look it up if you want, but there have been disturbing allegations against some of the organization’s staff as well as a questionable stance on AI-assisted writing. So I won't be recommending this particular challenge

That said, I ended up with a 56,000-word draft of my first ever novel. I wasn’t sure what to do next. So I did what plenty of writers before me have done.

I didn’t think about it for a year.

A huge reason was I had no idea how to get started on revisions. Screenplays are different beasts. You can easily read one in a single sitting. Strategizing and implementing revisions is something I was very experienced at. I know how long it takes (generally) for every stage of a screenplay’s evolution.

Novels are much different. There are just so many words. So I avoided the hard work and busied myself with other projects. I was still writing short stories and submitting them to publications. I even got a few published. But I knew I had to come back to the novel someday

I eventually sat down and read my book. It was a mess. But there was some good stuff in there. I began revising, chipping away at it for a year or so. I finally got it to a place where I was comfortable asking some friends to read it and give feedback. Asking for and receiving notes - now that’s something I’m familiar with. Their notes were encouraging and offered some great suggestions on where to focus my energies.

Then I avoided the damn thing for another six months or so. But eventually I dug back in and did more revisions. Toward the end of 2024, I was sure I could finish the book before Christmas and start the New Year fresh.

Didn’t happen.

Then LA was on fire. And the national news went from bad to totally awful. I forced myself to keep writing. The one nice thing about revising is you don’t have to be inspired. You just have to show up and chip away. And that’s what I did.

Until last week.

When I finally finished it.

I should say that “finished” is a relative term. This draft is at a place where I feel comfortable showing it to prospective agents. If I find someone who wants to help me pursue a publisher, then I’m sure there will be many more drafts to come. There’s a chance I might have to go it alone, submitting to independent “small presses”. And there are plenty of writers who self-publish their work and find much success there.

And since I tend to have modest expectations regarding stuff like this, I also have to face the possibility that nothing will happen. This could be the book that taught me how to write a book. I hope it finds a home and an audience. I hope someone cares.

My job is not to “sell” things, that’s out of my control. My job is to finish things and send them out (or “ship” - a term I learned from Seth Godin.) Then I repeat the process.

Write. Ship. Repeat.

It’s nice to take a moment and look back on something that’s taken years and remind myself that it’s been a journey. One that I hope continues. But for now, my job is done. I shipped it.

Now on to the next one.

I try to start the year fresh. It’s rejuvenating to have an open calendar in front of me and a new project to dive into. But it doesn’t always work out that way. I started the this year with a bunch of unfinished projects. I count at least four. It’s been driving me a little crazy to be honest. And I was hoping to wrap them up fast and get into some new stuff, but there’s been more than a little on my mind, such as:

LA was on fire.

The film & TV industry is in the midst of a massive contraction.

The tech we use every day has been carefully designed to drive me (and everyone) up the fucking wall.

And billionaires are currently wrecking our government and making this country very unsafe for a lot of people.

Not the easiest time to try and be creative. But that’s what I do for a living so I have to buckle up, turn off the internet, and finish some projects. In other words…

It’s time to clear the decks. And here’s what’s at the top of the list.

My novel

I’ll write more about this at a later date, but long-story-short I wrote a book in 2020. It’s a grounded sci-fi thriller, and I’ve been revising it part-time over the years.I’m close to having a “final” draft, and by final, I mean a draft that I feel comfortable submitting to some agents with the intention of trying to get it published. This is #1 on my to-do list and I look forward to wrapping it up soon.

Audio-drama pitch

I’ve been working with my friend and collaborator Ben Rock on a new audio drama, a cool horror show that we’re really jazzed to make. We developed a pitch doc with an exec we love at a company that’s primed to make cool stuff. We had a notes meeting a few days before Christmas, which was crazy because NO ONE in this business works at that time of year. But we got some notes, and then promptly took a big ol’ holiday break. After a couple weeks, Ben and I dug back into it in January and recently sent a revised pitch document to our exec. Now we wait.

New screenplay

I’ve had this idea for a crime-thriller itching at my skull for a while so last year I cranked out about half of it, showed it to Ben, and asked: is this something? I normally don’t share anything before there’s at least a full draft, but this has been a messy process so far. I was eager for some outside eyes. And I totally trust Ben as he knows what this process is like and where I’m at with it. And he said it’s something! That’s enough for me to keep going, so once I finish my book, that’s what I’ll get into next. Unless the audio thing takes off, but who knows?

Website

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I’m not planning anything fancy, but I’ve never had an actual website. I’ve had blogs, including this one of course. But I thought it was finally time to have a basic website with a bio, my body of work, and a way to contact me. As for what I want this site to be beyond that, I’m not sure. But it’s been on my to-do list for two years so it’s about time to get something out there, even if it’s a work-in-progress.

And that’s what it’ll take to clear the decks.

It won’t make everything rosy, of course. There’s still a constant sense of unease in the air, the feeling that chaos is going to come knocking on the door at any moment. It’s hard to know how to change things, so I lean on routine. I walk our dog, go to Kenpo class, read and journal every day. Try to doom-scroll as little as possible.

And I put my butt in my office chair and open up a document and write something. It’s never easy. Now it’s harder than ever. But it’s what I do. It’s how I try and make the world a better place. It is my purpose, my meaning.

Soon the decks will be cleared. And then it will be time to begin again.

I can’t wait.

So LA was on fire. It still is, but it’s mostly contained at this point. I’ve been trying to write about this for a while right now, failing horribly, and it made me realize something about myself as a writer:

I’m not very good at writing about things as they’re happening.

I need some distance from current events, some context, to write about them on a personal level. That’s why so much of this blog has been about chapters of my career in the past. I wasn’t blogging during those six years where I didn't work because I was in it, trying to write my way out, and I had zero understanding of what that period of time would mean to me until I was on the other side.

Social Media has trained us all to be commenters on the now. People who lived nowhere near LA could comment on the fires instantly with hot takes and opinions about what we did wrong or who was to blame or who deserved to have their house burn down.

Such bullshit.

All that matters is the people who lived through it. The brave first responders who fought that fucking fire every day and are still fighting it. The people who fled their homes, sometimes with zero notice. The people who lost everything. The people who lost nothing except their sense of safety.

My wife and I are so damn lucky to be in the latter category. We lost power for two days. We were never in an evacuation zone but the Sunset Fire in the nearby Hollywood Hills and the house fire in Studio City really spooked us. We’re okay, but packing up to possibly flee in the dark, using flashlights to illuminate closets filled with cherished mementos and somehow choosing what to save and what to leave…those memories won’t be gone anytime soon.

There were hopeful moments, too.

We had no power, but my wife’s theater did so she went there to rehearse the show they’re opening soon. Then they lost power, too, so she invited the entire cast back to our place and they rehearsed by candlelight in our living room and it felt normal, having a bunch of friends over, trying to make some art despite the circumstances.

This was a couple weeks ago, so I guess I’m getting some distance from it all and can write about it. But it’s hard to make sense of the loss. So many friends lost everything. Some I’ve been able to hug, some I don’t know when I’ll see them again. And this just feels like an opening salvo, like the potential for disaster is everywhere now. It’s hard to feel safe.

A lot of people are feeling that way, whether they live in LA or not. These are dangerous times, it seems. Our political system is a mess. A vengeful, convicted felon is once again the most powerful person in the world. A lot of people I care about are very scared. Plus, there’s AI and an unchecked tech culture and the feeling that corporations really don’t care if we live or die as long as we keep spending money.

I’m spiraling a bit here.

This was supposed to be the time of year where we ease back into life, set some goals, dream of what could be. But we started the year on fire and I don’t see the fires going out anytime soon, metaphorically speaking. So what to do?

Show up. Listen to people who are vulnerable. Gather with friends. Make art. Take care of our bodies. Walk a dog. Do that every day and after a time, hopefully, things will be a little better.

In the meantime, my job is to sit in my office and dream up stories that someone, someday, may wanna buy and make. I mean, it could be far worse. At least I still have an office. And a home. And loved ones.

The fires are at bay. For now.

LA gets quiet this time of year.

There are less cars on the road. That pre-holiday tension where drivers seem to be on the edge of freaking out seems to have subsided. Now, it’s pretty chill. The film & TV business is on hiatus for the most part. No producer calls. No contracts being passed back and forth. I have a small deal on someone’s desk (or inbox really) and it’s guaranteed that no one will look at it until January at the earliest.

I did have a notes call a couple days before Christmas with an exec but that was for a project in another medium. It’s way too early to talk about that one, it’s still in the pitch phase, but as always, I’m cautiously optimistic.

I’ve also been chipping away at “final” revisions on my novel. I put quotations around final because this is the draft that I’ll send to literary agents in the hopes of finding someone who wants to take the book out to try and find a publisher. The agent might request more revisions. If we’re successful in finding a publisher, then an editor will assuredly want me to work on the draft. But getting it to this point has taken years so I’m happy to be close to wrapping up this “final” stage.

My wife and I are often traveling at this time of year, visiting family and friends back home in Florida, but we’ve seen family multiple times already this year so it felt okay to stay here and skip the holiday travel madness. It’s been nice. A couple of holiday gatherings. A lazy Christmas day in our jammies eating leftovers, putting together a puzzle, watching movies.

New Year’s Eve is almost here and then it’ll be 2025, which brings with it a ton of “I don’t what’s gonna happen.” With the business. Our country. The world. It’s all feeling pretty uncertain. And one way I deal with uncertainty is to lean into routine. Walking our dog. Reading non-fiction and journaling before I write. Making my wife and I our afternoon coffees. Reading fiction before I go to sleep.

The end of the year brings some other routines as well. I’ll take stock of what I wrote over the last 12 months and write up my annual “year-end” document. As I’ve written about before, I’m not big on resolutions. Luckily, I’ve been training pretty hard at my Kenpo dojo, getting ready for a big test, so I don’t have to start the year with any “get back to the gym” sort of goals. Plus, a recent trip to the doctor revealed I have high blood pressure for the first time in my life, so I’m already watching what I eat, drinking less, and sticking to my workouts. Trying, anyway.

I’ll start the new year with some simple goals. Finish up my novel. Work on that pitch. Get back to a script I’ve been tinkering with. Read a bunch of books. And try to tackle this year with all the heart and hope I can muster.

That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s what I’ve got right now. And that’ll have to do.

I started this substack a year ago. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to say, but I was worried I’d overthink it for a long time and then never get started.

So I picked a title and went for it.

I’m glad I did. It’s nice knowing that I’ve already got a year under my belt as I’ve figured out the kinds of stories I want to tell as I seek out the people who to want hear them. At first, I wasn’t exactly sure who my audience was. I imagined that early-in-their-career screenwriters might be interested. Maybe people who just wanted to know more about showbiz. And hopefully colleagues and friends would check it out. .

Screenwriters really aren’t in the public eye very much. When you read an article about one, it’s usually some version of “x was bartending right up until their script sold for a million bucks” or “y’s first script won them an Oscar.” It’s those stories that fuel the dreams of thousands of would-be professional screenwriters around the world.

What don’t you read a lot of is stories that go “x took a bunch of meetings and pitched on a lot of jobs and then booked one and wrote a draft but they got fired because the director wanted to bring on y whose last script sold for a million bucks but at least x made a little money and is out now pitching for the next job.”

I’ve had the ups of big movies being released and life-changing paydays along with the downs of getting fired and enduring long stretches of time where no one seemed to care at all if I was available for work or not. I’ve always felt it was important to share the true ins and outs of this business and what having a career in screenwriting really looks like.

If you’re reading this, then hopefully you like these stories. I’ve written honest posts about what it was like to have a six year gap in my career and how I wrote my way out of it. I was worried these stories might be a bummer, but some people have responded in the comments that these posts are “inspiring” and honestly, nothing could make me happier. If writers can hear stories like these and find inspiration to keep pushing toward their own career dreams, then that’s all I can really hope for.

I just think it’s unfair to only share the wins in a way that makes a screenwriting career look like a trajectory that’s always on the way up. The reality is much tougher for just about everyone. But it’s also worth it.

I have more stories to share, but I’m also looking ahead to the future. I was worried that the title “All Is (Not) Lost” might no longer be relevant someday, especially (hopefully) if my career hits another sweet spot.

But we’re looking at a near future where “all is (not) lost” will, for better or worse, still mean something. Because the industry is in a state of massive contraction and realignment and it’s impossible for anyone to know what this business will look like in a year or two. Plus there’s the reality of AI which is going to touch everyone’s life in some way. Will it take my job and the jobs of my friends? We’ll have to wait and see.

And I don’t write often about the world at large, but I can safely say that we’ve been in a really volatile patch of time and we’re about to enter another few years that will probably redefine what volatile even means. Myself and a lot of people I care about are deeply concerned about what’s to come. Saying “all is not lost” in the midst of these anxious times may seem a little pat, but I’m an optimist at heart and I dearly hope that we will see our way through these trying times.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep writing. Keep trying to make stuff with my friends. Hopefully make a decent living while I’m at it.. And I’ll keep sharing stories about my “middle-class” screenwriting career that are hopefully interesting, inspiring, and most of all truthful.

Thank you for reading this past year…or if this is your first time coming ‘round, then welcome! If you can hear stories about the crazy stuff that happens to me and others in this business and STILL want to pursue a career in screenwriting, then this is for sure the Substack for you.

And maybe it’s privileged for me to say, but I truly believe that no matter how crazy things get in this business (and the world) that there is hope in the future. Because, well…

…all is definitely not lost.