THE WRITING IS ALWAYS THE THING

ON THE TWO NEW BOOKS AND SCREENPLAY I MUST COMPLETE BEFORE THE NEXT FILM CAN TAKE FLIGHT

Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

AUTHOR-TURNED-PROCRASTINATOR’S NOTE: First off, I wanna apologize ONCE AGAIN for taking so long to get back here to you. And believe me, it wasn’t for lack of having cool things to talk about.

Our screening of The Great Divide – way back on December 9th, at the Clinton Street Theater – might have been my favorite show to date. I don’t know why, but it felt sooooo much like home. And everybody there – including a number of smiling perfect strangers – felt just like family, in all the best ways. Wanna play that place again. And again!

Meanwhile, we’re looking hard at other indie theaters across the Pacific Northwest, to spend the next several months building a homegrown following. I think localized populist movements are gonna be all the rage, over the coming years. And this seems like a great place to start, before moving on to the rest of the English-speaking world, just for starters.

The Great Divide is also now up on Film Freeway, as we decide which film festivals we might wanna hit over the coming year. (Just realized we totally missed the deadline on the Scares That Care International Film Festival, which I reeeeeally wanted to do. So if anybody can help slide me in the back door, that would be awesome. Otherwise, GODDAMIT!!!)

And odds are very good that we’re gonna wind up on FilmHub, when we bring the film to streaming. Still working out the deets. But very exciting, strategizing here on the new indie film frontier. STAY TUNED!!!

This, however, is not why I’ve been so glaringly absent.

Allow me to dispense with the italics here, and properly explain.

***

In the olden days, before I a) became a film producer and b) stopped drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, I used to write every single night. And I mean EVERY night. It was my ritual, and my spiritual practice. It was how I expressed my devotion, my purpose in this life.

But when I became a producer – first with the short film Doppelbanger, then with the as-yet-unproduced haunted concert film Duke Moses: The Farewell Tour, and then at last The Great Divide – that totally changed. Suddenly, my job was to give my writing flesh. To build teams. To raise money. And to move from generating stacks of screenplays that never got made to actually directing the fucking films.

Which is why, over the past now-nearly two years, I’ve barely written at all. Just the script for TGD, and all the music in it, plus two tiny short-short stories, a trillion outlines and emails, budgets and schedules, and the 182 Substack columns preceding this one. (Today’s grand total: 183!)

All of this was absolutely necessary, in getting where I need to go. Trust me, I’m not complaining. (Much.) These are all rites of passage. And the fact that they took me this long to get here just underscores how badly I needed them, and how transformative they are.

But the one thing that got totally sacrificed in the process was the practice of writing itself. The daily habit. The ritual discipline, which I had cultivated over the previous thirty-some years, of sitting down to dream in print every night, for at least three hours. Sometimes five. Sometimes twelve. Sometimes more. Almost always till I dropped.

Why did I do that? Because I fucking loooooooove to write. To dive in deep and thoroughly. To swim in the stories flowing through my sub-and-unconscious, letting them drench me in their details, soaking them in and then pouring them out as dancing narrative fiction or script.

It’s pure creativity, unfettered and alone with the flow, where the goal is to be so open that nothing gets past you unnoticed, and so innately focused that your instincts know precisely what to pluck from where, when, in order to draw the maps and paint these pictures of infinity.

It’s not just my job, though indeed it is that. It’s not just my stated mission on this Earth.

It’s also some of the most fun I ever have, on this Earth or any other.

So I had been missing it severely, even as I loved every speck of crafting and cultivating The Great Divide, from seed to full-grown fruit. The absence of the ritual gnawed at me, made my life feel waaaay more sprawling and scattered, even as the rigors of pre-through-post-production commanded and demanded my complete and total attention.

But now that the time has finally come to go back into the dream pool, and bring back visions, what happens?

Dude, I am soooooo out of practice, it’s ridiculous. All that daily discipline from the past three-plus decades? Almost completely down the drain.

You know how they say it’s like riding a bike? Like, once you know how, you can jump right back on? Well, that’s totally true. But it leaves out the part when you get on a bike for the first time in years, plunk your ass on the seat, and go, “Wait…how the fuck does this work again?”

I mean, yeah, of course you’ll figure it out. Soon enough, you’ll be cruising with the wind in your hair. But for those first couple minutes – at least – there’s a resistance and a terror that comes from forgetting that you know what you know. It’s a powerfully paralyzing force, born entirely of inertia and dread. It’s the thing you put away, but that needs you again.

So that’s what the last couple weeks have been like for me.

And it would have been fine, if it was just the next screenplay, which has been happily taking shape in both my head and my collaborator’s. Once I got back in the groove, we could tear through it like cotton candy.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to securing financing. And though I’m gonna be cagey about the details for now – because, trust me, the delay will be worth the wait – there are now not one but TWO COOL NEW BOOKS that have to be written and delivered in the next month’s time, in order to pave the way for that next film.

Writing the intro to the second one took me all of nine days to write all of nine pages. That’s how hard it fucking fought me. (Although, now that I’m done, I’m pleased.)

And it’s taken me three days to write the first three pages of the new novelette that will be part of Book #1. Which puts me roughly one-tenth of the way through this 10,000 word story, which will help set the stage for Book #2 and new movie.

Were I to keep writing at this rate, it would take me a month to even start writing the new script, without which I have nothing to shoot. But that ain’t gonna be the case. Because yesterday, I wrote all three of those first three pages. And today, I bet I write at least a half-dozen more.

As of yesterday, I am back on the underwater bike, flying through my story’s secrets with a big wide net. The words are coming. And all is flow.

As for this column, I’m hoping that plowing through my narrative paralysis will make regular posting more frequent as well. I don’t like leaving the column bare. Am thinking 3-5 pieces a week might be a wise target to shoot for.

So again, apologies for the last three weeks of slackitude. I promise this new work will be worth it, and we will be springing it alarmingly soon.

But not until it’s ready. Because good work takes time. And joy. And discipline.

It feels good to be back.