Puppets!

This video, of a puppet interacting with people on ChatRoulette, is… do you ever see something on the internet that makes you clap your hands with delight? YES, like that.

(Contains a drawing of a wang but is otherwise safe for work. Come on, this is the internet. YOU KNOW WHAT’S OUT THERE, PEOPLE.)

Steer into the skid!

This morning I took Husband Guy to the airport so he could go to HAWAII. For Army Skool. But still, it’s in Hawaii. I don’t know why his unit doesn’t lie and claim their school happens in Nebraska. “Oh yeah, it’s terrible. It’s all in this drafty blimp hangar out in the plains, and usually you have to bunk with some elk for warmth and stuff… it’s a real hardship.”

(Hawaii! So mean.)

Because God lives for maximum irony, on the way to the airport for this Hawaii jaunt, I totally got the car stuck in a snowdrift, and even Husband Guy attempting to push it out didn’t work. So then I said “OKAY I’LL GET THE SNOW SHOVEL” and sprinted back to the garage (by “on the way to the airport” I mean “in the driveway” and by “sprinted” I mean “loped in an ungainly fashion on account of how I was wearing enormous insulated snow boots”) and ran back and we dug out the car. And he made his flight.

To Hawaii.

Winter in the Finger Lakes is interesting! Husband Guy keeps insisting that the climate here is actively hostile and trying to kill you. Sometimes I think he’s right, and then sometimes I think “Oh, how beautiful, a single deer silhouetted against the snow!” and then immediately afterward I think “HOLY FRIGIDAIRE IT’S COLD”. Obviously years in Southern California have made me weak.

On the way home from the airport, I hit a patch of road that hadn’t been salted properly, and even though I was driving slowly and cautiously, I started to skid. And as my car skidded off the road, with my new baby in the back seat, all I could think was two things:

1) So awkward to have to call your Husband Guy and be all “So, you know how you left me to take care of your baby? HERE’S THE THING WITH THAT.”

2) First, watch this awesome video of Flight of the Conchords:

Now think about how people are always telling you to STEER INTO THE SKID but then if you press for more details, nobody ever knows WHAT THAT MEANS EXACTLY.

So you know that part in the above song where Jemaine goes “What? Why? Be more constructive with your feedback, please.” ? (1:30)

As I skidded off the road in the gently-falling pre-dawn snow, trying desperately to figure out what “Steer into the skid” MEANS IN PRACTICAL TERMS, that’s all I could think about. BE MORE SPECIFIC WITH YOUR INSTRUCTIONS, PLEASE. In Jemaine Voice.

(Everything was fine. I did indeed skid off the road, but amazingly only into someone’s extremely conveniently placed double-wide driveway! Phew.)

How to sell coffee to a small subset of the population

Have you seen that coffee commercial where the dude comes home for Christmas and then his little sister takes him into the kitchen and makes him coffee and they stare at each other in a way that makes you, the viewer, really uncomfortable UNLESS YOU ARE MARRIED TO YOUR FIRST COUSIN?

Here it is:

What is going on with that! Did everyone already know about this commercial? Does everyone go “Oh, it’s almost Christmas! Time for the incest/coffee commercial again, I can’t wait!”?

Why didn’t you tell me about it?

And why did nobody at any point in the commercial-making chain go “WAIT A MINUTE. HAVE YOU NOTICED HOW THIS GIRL OBVIOUSLY WANTS TO DO IT TO HER OLDER BROTHER? WHAT ARE WE SAYING ABOUT COFFEE DRINKERS YOU GUYS?!?”?

The Youtube comments are pretty entertaining, if you’re down for that sort of thing. Basically they split into two groups of people: those who are offended by the “West Africa” reference and those who are offended that others are all “Say, that “You’re my present this year”+romantic doe-eyed gazing part is pretty weird, eh?” – because, apparently, that’s how brothers and sisters are and anyone who questions it hates families and is a bad American.

The weirdest part is how the sister is obviously creepily, sexually obsessed with her older brother, but he’s trying to be all cool! He brings her things from West Africa! Like maybe a lame hat to match the one he was wearing! But the sister TOTALLY WANTS TO BANG HIM, and then the editor cuts to the brother and he’s really torn. Like you can see him thinking “….that is so gross!” and yet also “A man gets lonely in West Africa. Real lonely.”

Happy strange holiday!

So my parents are career ex-pats, and I mostly grew up in Holland. Which is mostly a pretty cool place where everyone is very tall and zips around town on bicycles and is tolerant and skeptical.

(I know “Holland” makes you think of drugs and hookers but really that’s just because YOU YOURSELF are interested in these topics. Actual Dutch people are polite and speak outstanding English and think that Americans are crazy and all twisted up in knots about boring topics like SEX and MARIJUANA.)

Today, December 5th, is a big deal in Holland. It is Sinterklaas, which is the main traditional winter gift-giving holiday there. Sinterklaas is also the name of the dude who brings the gifts. Sinterklaas is a smooshing-together of the fellow’s name, Sint Nikolaas (Saint Nicholas). He looks like this:

Could take Santa in a fight.

He is the bishop of Turkey.

But he comes to Holland on a steam boat (In most towns, a boat will actually show up down by the river and a guy dressed like the Sint (plus horse and entourage) will disembark. This is MUY EXCITING if you’re seven years old.) from Spain. Where he lives. I don’t know why. Maybe Turkey lacks glamor.

He rides a white horse:

Something to know about this guy is that he’s kind of mean! Unlike jolly Saint Nick (I guess Santa Claus is a fatter, drunker version of this guy) Sinterklaas is pretty stern and terrible. If you’ve been a good little boy or girl, he’ll bring you treats. If you’ve been bad, he’ll bring you “roe”: a bundle of sticks I guess your parents can use to spank you. If you’ve been VERY bad, he’ll STUFF YOU IN A SACK AND DRAG YOU BACK TO SPAIN.

On the night of Sinterklaas, “pakjesavond” (um, “the night of little packages”), you give gifts. Most families would traditionally draw names so that everyone was just giving one gift to one other person, and the gifts are usually pretty small. The point of pakjesavond isn’t so much the gifts as it is the “surprises” (pronounce in the French wise) – people make these crazy-elaborate… I don’t know how to explain this. You have to write a poem about the person you’re giving the gift to (and the poems are usually funny and mean) and then you package the gift in this elaborately creative… disguise. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN THIS. I TOLD YOU. But like if you were giving someone a book and the person was notorious for needing reading glasses, maybe you’d make this giant fake book out of cardboard with giant letters on it and everyone would go “Ha ha ha! Because the gift recipient is basically BLIND! Ha ha ha… awesome.”

On the night before Sinterklaas, you “put out your shoe”. Much like the American tradition of stockings, you’d put it near a fireplace if you could, and you’d find little treats in it in the morning. If you don’t have a fireplace, you might put it near a radiator or something.

Treats brought by Sinterklaas include things like:

Chocolate letters.

Tasty citrus.

Pepper nuts: hey are tiny and hard and they throw them at you and they sting.

Here is the most amazing part about Sinterklaas. His servants are guys named “Zwarte Piet” (“Black Pete” – you can maybe see where this is going.)

Zwarte Piet is usually explained to look the way he does because he’s Moorish. Sometimes people say that it’s because he spends time in chimneys, either sweeping them or going up and down them to drop off candy in peoples’ shoes.

Most Americans would probably look at Zwarte Piet and gasp and say, in an appalled undertone, “But– he’s in blackface!”

Yep.

They all have the same name, and the number of them depends. They’re understood to be both a single person and a group of people: like Walt Whitman, Zwarte Piet is large, he contains multitudes.

The other interesting thing about Sinterklaas is that often a family will get like a neighbor or an uncle to pretend to be the Sint and come around the house and bang loudly on the door and then open it and fling TINY HARD CANDIES AND COOKIES into the house and also a bag of gifts.

THIS SCARES THE SHIT OUT OF YOU IF YOU ARE A LITTLE KID. Like little kids will somewhat understandably freak the hell out and start screaming and crying, because some mean angular white dude is going to beat you with sticks and shove you into a bag and take you to Spain or Turkey or something, man! Also his entourage/possible slaves throw tiny hard cookies at you and that shit hurts.

Anyway – I wanted to wish you all a HAPPY SINTERKLAAS!

Bloggy blog blog

Husband Guy keeps a blog about the craziness associated with… you know… having a baby, health care, etc (NO WE DID NOT ORCHESTRATE A DRAMATIC NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE TO BETTER BOOKEND THE NARRATIVE. Although I know it seems suspect.) and I just posted over there about STUFF. (Get this! Today a doctor accidentally revealed that I didn’t just almost-die, I APPARENTLY ACTUALLY, I DON’T KNOW, HAD A NON-BEATING HEART or something. Crazy.)

The only other thing I have to share is that I have been watching a lot of Glee. It is The Best. I wish I could travel back in time to Halloween and cut and bleach my hair and acquire an awesome tracksuit so I could go as SUE SYLVESTER.

PS, her Twitter feed is pretty good.

PPS, I love this blog: Autocomplete Me. I enjoyed this recent one particularly.

Happy veterans day!

You should, even if you’re some kind of pinko liberal, totally use today as an excuse to Thank A Veteran. I think veterans find it sort of awkward to be thanked, but I also think it’s good for them to be thanked and good for us to be thankful, SO THEY WILL JUST HAVE TO DEAL WITH IT.

If you’re stuck for something to say, I think “Thank you for your service, sir and/or ma’am” (only don’t actually say “sir and/or ma’am” unless you enjoy getting punched in the face) is totally acceptable. HOWEVER, because I’m mean, I often enjoy watching Husband Guy squirm awkwardly when people thank him profusely (it’s particularly great when people get all tense and uptight and go off into these sort of strange conversational eddies where they then turn to me and say things like “And so hard for you, too, I mean, what if he dies?!?” – so far be it from me to discourage the more floral expressions of gratitude people sometimes get into.)

In other news, I am still alive! And still in the hospital. I have been moved out of the intensive care unit, which is awesome. On the second day I was back to consciousness, I sent Husband Guy an email wherein I expressed tremendous concern about WHY MY BRAIN WAS SO FUCKED UP (because my brain was totally fucked up, among other things I kept hallucinating O’Neill t-shirt designs from 1993…), and he said, well, you were on magnesium for the blood pressure, which makes you all weird, and sedatives, which make you all weird, and you almost died… which is kind of weird. AND, per his doctor sister, there’s this thing called “ICU psychosis”, where because the ICU is a 24-hour situation where people keep coming in and turning on lights and stabbing you in the veins and waking you up to check your vitals at 4am, you eventually lose all track of what the fuck is going on with anything… sort of like people at GITMO or something.

And that’s totally true! I wish for everyone reading this that you never have to spend any time in an ICU. The people who work there are saints, and it still TOTALLY BLOWS. At one point I woke up in the middle of the night to hear some dude on the ward screaming “I AM LEAVING AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME!!!!” and if I had been able to talk I would have yelled “That is so totally right on, man!” – but, you know, I had the Darth Vader Valve in my throat and couldn’t produce any sound at all. So I just laid there and then slowly fell asleep again as I stared into space in terror… good times.

(Or even last night, they moved me up to the normal lady ward, but if you’re me and they’re worried about you because of the near-death crap, they check your vitals frequently to make sure you’re alive, or they might need to draw your blood or whatever… so you’ll be deeply asleep and then it’s “KNOCKKNOCKKNOCK! Midnight Phlebotomist!” and you sleepily peer over the edge of the blanket as someone you’ve never seen before rams a needle into your vein and draws multiple vials of blood. I am fairly easy-going, but this sort of thing gets real old real fast.)

BUT. Like I said, now I am out of the ICU and they changed out my Vader Valve, for this other kind of valve, so I can speak, and my jerk personality has come rushing back. Here is an illustration:

So every once in a while you get this announcement over the PA that sounds to me like “AMA in the Emergency Department”. Which I interpreted as “Against Medical Advice in the emergency Department” – so, you know, in my head this was some super-surly person (much like in the guy freaking out in the ICU) losing it in the ER and being all “YOU’ll NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE COPPAS!” and trying to storm out. And I imagined that there was some kind of “AMA rapid response team” where very reasonable people with soothing voices would go talk to this person about how they really needed to stick around and get their lungs listened to or whatever…

And when the young doctor who was swapping out my Vader Valve heard my theory, she smiled politely and said “It’s actually AMI” and Husband Guy blanched and said “Oh.” and I said “…what? WHAT?!?” and it turns out that it’s basically a call for “Hey guys, somebody’s having a heart attack in the ER”.

SO I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON, I have been rooting for an imaginary surly guy every time when it really turns out that someone might be DYING.

(I think it was disappointing to the staff here when I regained the power of speech: when I couldn’t talk and I was on weird drugs, I was silent and docile and sweet. It must have been a shock to realize that I’m really sarcastic.)

***

My kid got his first pair of pants today. It’s a jumpsuit with feet. The feet have small trucks on them. Because ALL INFANT CLOTHING is super-gendered. Which is fine, I don’t care. But. Trucks? Realistically, the only things this kid is interested in are milk and napping and occasionally a diaper change. THAT’S IT. He’s not into trucks, it’s not like he has any hobbies.

***

I am now going to totally embarrass you AND my husband, by talking about how impressed I am by him:

When I had seizures and almost died due to the ECLAMPSIA, he kept it together and got me to a hospital so I didn’t die, etc. And when I woke up again, it took me several days to figure out that, HEY WAIT A MINUTE, I ALMOST DIED, DIDN’T I?!? because Husband Guy would show up at my bedside and instead of freaking out or sobbing or whatever, he’d be stoic and mildly funny and wearing attractive sweaters. So for several days– you know, I dimly understood that things had not been great, but I didn’t understand the immediacy of the almost-dying.

Here is the thing about Husband Guy: he is the best and toughest and most moral person I have ever known. And you know what, EVEN IF our marriage crashes and burns, I am willing to stipulate that the above is true. In public. On the internet. So there.

And among various reasons I’m pleased that I didn’t die I must number prominently the fact that I get to keep hanging out with him. Also, he joins me in enjoying lame military jokes. (The hospital beds here are Stryker brand. He may be the one other person who finds that amusing. Imagine how terrible it would be for the world if I hadn’t married him, I’d go around inflicting “tactical bed” jokes on people who would respond to them like so: “…” – really, we’re all much better off like this.)

So… there you go, embarrassing you all with my fawning. I’m sorry – you watch your husband cradle your tiny child and call him “little pig”, you GET ALL GROSS, HORMONES ARE TERRIBLE.

Because of today being International Cuddle A Veteran Day, and also because… you know, I like dogs, and there aren’t any in this hospital, here you go: Mental Floss collects videos of dogs welcoming their soldier dads home from the wars. There is something kind of wrong with you if video of burly gruff dudes referring to themselves as “Daddy” and cradling outsize retrievers like they’re lapdogs doesn’t give you a mild attack of Something In Your Eye.

Or, to put it in another, more-sarcastic way:

see more Funny Graphs

This is a post about how I had a kid

So last Tuesday I got up and started puttering around- the main thing I had planned for the day was a conference call with a director who apparently digs one of my scripts. These calls usually get initiated by Your Agent’s Office, and then they have to tie it in to His Agent’s Office, and to him, and to you… and anyway, I always get paranoid, for no reason at all, that something is going to go wrong.

BECAUSE I AM A RECOVERING ASSISTANT, is why.

But instead of that call going wrong… or instead of even having that call! Let me tell you what happened.

I had a baby.

ALSO.

I ALMOST DIED.

WITH THE DYING.

YES.

So there are going to be lots of gaps here, because of how I was unconscious for most of it. And then when I was technically conscious again, I was on this hilarious drug cocktail that made me completely vague. So I wasn’t really conscious-conscious again for days and days and am only now, almost a week later, sort of back to my normal personality.

LESSON ONE ABOUT ALMOST DYING: man, we take shit way too damn seriously. I could elaborate on this, but I won’t. Because, see:

LESSON TWO ABOUT ALMOST DYING: if you almost die and then don’t die, people who love you are going to be really upset and then really relieved. They won’t dig it very much when you tell them things like “Hah, man, we take shit way too damn seriously.” So… you should shut up.

LESSON THREE ABOUT ALMOST DYING: if you have my personality and you almost die and then you can’t speak because of how they put in an emergency airway thing called a “tracheostomy” so you could breathe-and-not-die, you are just going to be wasting a lot of jokes in your head. If you married the right person you will occasionally look over at him and he will articulate the exact joke you are dying to make. (Also, your best friend will say of this entire thing: “Man, it must be SO ROUGH to be you and not be able to talk right now.”)

So anyway! Long story short, most of the time pregnant ladies have totally normal pregnancies and totally normal births/etc. And honestly I feel like in general people are way too scaremongery about stuff and I am super sciencey and skeptical about peoples’ crazy medical paranoia… so it’s totally embarrassing that I am the one person who actually almost does the out of the blue dying! Pfffft. Awkward.

BUT, very occasionally it turns out that there is this thing, “eclampsia”, that basically involves crazy seizures and almost dying and nobody really knows why or how it happens or how to prevent it (yes, it’s like an overly-complicated episode of House.) and it can kill you and the fetus and it happens in one out of every two or three thousand pregnancies, and they can look for the signs but sometimes, like in my case, there aren’t really any.

So that’s what happened. Out of nowhere, I had spectacular seizures and had to have an emergency c-section and blah blah blah… I totally survived, and my kid was Forced Into This World Too Soon but is basically a pretty cool person.

Everyone else, understandably, is kind of shaken by the drama of this week. But I, the person who did the actual almost-dying, am lamely kind of unmoved by the whole thing. But NOT because I am a cool person or anything like that. No… it’s because of how I was either unconscious or on the hilarious drug cocktail OR basically coming off the brain trip of “Man… we take shit too seriously!” the whole time and so pretty much missed everything.

(Don’t get me wrong! I am pretty sure this is an epic event blah blah blah, and as soon as I can stay awake for more than a certain number of hours in a row I am totally going to start processing it and then do some Serious Writing about it, because, man, if you are a writer and you almost-die and you don’t milk it for material you are some kind of sucker, you know what I’m saying?)

Anyway, here is a short video of my kid from his third day of life (I think it was his third day, anyway.) – he is Very Small, because he wasn’t ready to be born, so he only weighs four pounds (!!!) – but he appears to be in otherwise splendid shape and he really likes to eat (right on!) so hopefully we can fatten him up ASAP.

We named him Henry Oak Charles.

Charles for my father, and Oak because I’m named after a tree, too, and Henry JUST BECAUSE (and because Husband Guy and I are enamored of the possibility of calling someone “Hammerin’ Hank *lastname*”.)

He’s pretty cool, like I said. Mostly he sleeps or eats, and I don’t want to brag, but he’s totally mellower than the OTHER babies in the unit, who are all whiny about stuff all the time. Henry is more like “Oh, hey, milk you say? I should eat that. And then kind of wave my hands around vaguely yet meaningfully in front of my face… After that I’m taking a nap, feel free to join in.”

Christopher Walken performs Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face”

Happy Halloween.

Life of a pseudo-writer, II

Socialized medicine

One of the things about having a kid is that suddenly you MUST HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE. Like many ne’er-do-well young Americans, I didn’t have any, so Husband Guy kindly semi-rejoined ARMY to provide us with-

WAIT FOR IT-

SOCIALIZED HEALTH CARE

PAID FOR BY YOUR TAXES, AMERICA!

That’s right. You read it, you can’t unread it.

So the other day we drove to the nearest Army base so I could get a flu shot. Because of how civilian doctors here don’t have any (I guess the state underordered… or the factories overpromised, who knows.)

And what was totally weird is that going to a military treatment facility is basically like going to a normal doctor, only without all of the sucky parts.

TO WIT:

*You get seen super-quickly.
*By someone who is polite and efficient.
*And who gives you the thing you’re there for.
*At no cost to you.

PS, I DID NOT NOTICE A SINGLE DEATH PANEL… and I was totally on the lookout.

The other outstanding thing: the many wild turkeys wandering around. I tried to find pictures to share with you, but I think maybe it’s semi- or entirely illegal to take pictures without permission on military installations, and I couldn’t find any. But basically you need to picture VERY SERIOUS MEN in VERY SERIOUS HUMVEES pausing to let a flock of turkeys mosey slowly across the road in front of them.

It was Quite Good.

And now, for some more of my bullshit notes on being a fake writer! I know you’ve been waiting anxiously.

Specs vs. pitches.

So when I was an entire year or two younger and wandering around fantasizing about HOW GREAT it would be when I achieved fabulousness and got a dog, I always assumed that the fabulousness would happen because of someone being all “Oh man, I just love this thing you wrote, I would like to try to get it made! HERE IS SOME MONEY.”

HA HA HA.

I don’t think people actually buy specs anymore. I mean, I know they do, but the rate of buying and selling is so low as to not really be relevant to people like me.

I don’t even think about selling a spec. (Listen, I would be ecstatic. I would buy a dog and name it after my agency. I just don’t expect it to happen.) I think of specs as samples that tell people that you’re not an idiot, and they should meet with you, and maybe give you a shot at pitching your take on some dead project they have kicking around.

If you as a young baby-writer type person manage to transition from “chump” to “chump who just made WGA minimum”, I am pretty sure it will be because of an assignment. Not rewriting your own spec or anything like that.

But that’s fine. I assume that most of us who are trying to be film or TV writers are not super precious about our WORDS and our ART and get that we are essentially craftspersons for hire.

However – and this is, unfortunately, going to sound super precious about my WORDS and my ART – as most writers would, I think, agree, the hard part of writing is not the writing, it’s not the typing, it’s not the part where John says this and then Jenna says this in response, and then John freaks out and puts his fist through the drywall and then Jenna is all, calm down, it was just that one time, I didn’t even know he was into armadillos!!!

The hard part of writing is the part where you come up with the idea. And the world. And the characters. And then you plot it out, beat by beat, twist by turn. And all the pieces have to click into the next bit, like a machine.

All of that is hard when it is your idea.

When you’re working on your take for an assignment – and OKAY MAYBE I AM PRECIOUS, I don’t know, I’m just being honest – none of that stuff really belongs to you, and sometimes maybe the idea or the characters don’t connect with you, but you still have to do it. You still have to do all of that work. And the more you feel like this project isn’t exactly the kind of thing you would have come up with on your own, the tougher it is. But you push through it, and come up with something (hopefully) you feel okay about walking into a room and pitching.

And then you don’t get the job.

Why you don’t get the job

Well, first, it’s of course entirely possible that it’s because you’re just not good enough, or because you pitched something totally lame. (I do not mean to give the impression that I think that I am For Sure Good Enough or anything like that.) But I think the following factors also sometimes come into play:

*There are not that many jobs to begin with.
*Not all of the jobs have money attached anyway. (Think of these as “jobs”, if you will.)
*You are going to be up against lots of other people for the same job. Or “job”.
*On account of how I’m a cynical jerk and I used to work for people who did things like this, I sometimes sort of suspect that the job/”job” is actually mostly the executive generating meetings to justify his or her continued employment (“See, boss?!? I’m developing with both hands! WATCH ME TAP DANCE.”) and not really about how the company totally wants to reboot a Michael Biehn movie from 1989… you know?
*Some of those jobs/”jobs” will be at studios where stern edicts have come down from on high about how the company can hire anybody they want so long as the person is on this list of six pre-approved A-list writers, GUESS WHAT, BABY WRITERS, YOU ARE NOT ON THAT LIST.
*Most of the time, even with your very best efforts to nail the story that you think best fits the company’s idea, you will get it wrong. You will pitch the executive a version that just doesn’t trip the story switch in his or her brain.

And there’s just not much you can do about that last part. Even though occasionally the executive will kind of act as though you should have known better, I don’t believe that’s true. You swung and you missed, them’s the breaks.

PS: For TV writers, based on what my friend K. has said, it’s the same but worse. You go up for baby staff writer jobs, but those jobs barely exist anymore, so you’re now not just competing with all the other baby writers, you’re competing with people who held supervising producer spots on some award-winning cable drama, but who have lowered their quote to survive. You are probably not going to win out against that person. Not because you’re not as good, but because, you know… if you’re the showrunner, and you can hire “great writer” or “great writer+five years experience on a show”…

Not getting the job can be kind of tough.

Not like lying around on the couch sobbing, tough. And usually I guess you probably don’t care in a very immediate, personal sense, because it wasn’t your idea and it wasn’t your big passionate thing anyway.

But a few times I have pitched something I genuinely loved. And to not get those is kind of… I don’t know, APPARENTLY I AM PRECIOUS ABOUT MY WOOOOORDS.

(Listen, if you weren’t lame and sensitive, you wouldn’t be a writer to begin with, so WHATEVS.)

I don’t know what the answer to this is, or if there even is an answer. I think that maybe it has something to do with Zen archery:

You have to just I guess get super good at it and then also literally not give a rat’s ass if you hit or miss. So you do your very best, you get genuinely passionate about the story, you LOVE what you came up with. And then you detach completely. Ego death. Not only can you not care that you might not get the job, you can’t care that you came up with the best character EVER and he’ll never see the light of day, you can’t even write about him, because none of it belongs to you.

Please let me know if you find a way to do this.

The worst thing about pitching on assignments.

It can suck up all of your CREATIVE LIFE JUICES and leave you this crazy drained husk of a person where you never work on your own stuff, you just stare into space and panic and try to come up with a Fresh And Original Twist That Is Almost Exactly Like Taken, Yet Different, so you can go pitch on it and not get the job.

Apropos of nothing.

Look, if you’re a writer you’re probably kind of dorky and weird, or you wouldn’t be a writer. Remember that speech on 30 Rock where Jack tells Liz that she “…Got into this business because she’s funny and she’s weird and she’s socially retarded.”? Like that!

Here’s the thing you have to wrap your brain around: people who have offices with doors in Hollywood are mostly also quite weird (but don’t realize it, THEY NEVER EVER REALIZE IT) and fingergunsy and the kind of people who tell you stories about themselves that you know are supposed to impress you, but you never understand WHY.

Like the stories are always about how they went cave-fishing in El Salvador with some communists. And then they pause and look at you. And you go “Wow! Communists, huh?” and that is THE EXACT WRONG RESPONSE, YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT SPEARFISHING, JESUS H CHRIST.

Finally, on pitches:

Obviously, I don’t actually get these jobs, so my insight is of uber-questionable value. But for what it’s worth, here’s pretty much everything I know:

*You must know every beat in the story. You can’t just go in with a premise and your act breaks and your major turning points. You need to know it soup to nuts, even if you end up skipping over the second-act subplot in the meeting.
*Get to your inciting incident faster. In fact, see if you can’t lop off your entire first act and just start in the middle of the story and catch us up as we go. For some reason I think that easing us into the story works on the page in a way it doesn’t when you’re telling it out loud.
*You must do them faster. When you’re just writing specs at night after your assistant job, you can pretty much take as long as you want. When you’re going after assignments, you need to be able to turn a really comprehensive outline around in about a week or ten days. That is very difficult. I personally have found it surprisingly impossible. I don’t know if I have the kind of brain that can do it, frankly. (Which leads me to think that maybe there’s a Don-Draper-style personality successful screenwriters have. Or something.)
*Yes, it is going to suck to come up with big set-pieces and then dump them into your mental shredder. I think you just have to get over that.
*The actual sitting there and pitching is kind of weird and unpleasant, unless you are a writer who is also an actor (I’m guessing). I am NOT A PERFORMER at all. I do not like pitch meetings. I am just not naturally comfortable trying to sell things, or saying things like “And then we have this fucking awesome chase sequence where our hero disembowels a guy using a goat he found by the side of the road…” …see: how I am not like Don Draper. But I have found that it does get easier. You just have to accept that it’s awkward and lame and plow through it.
*At the end of your pitch most executives will rewrite it for you. Sometimes they have really great ideas. You should steal those. But sometimes they are telling you in an elaborate way that they really disliked your pitch and you are no longer in the running. Sit there and smile and nod, Liz.
*It is super-easy to just chase assignments and not do your own work. Super-easy. My main regret from this year is that I got too sucked in to pitching. If I had it to do over again I would not pitch on less stuff, but I would, somehow, find more time to work on my own specs. I feel like that’s the only way you don’t lose your mind.

That is all for now! I have, I think, one more installment in my BORING NOTES ON BEING A FAKE WRITER series. (EXCITED?!?)

PS: I do hope I don’t sound grouchy and bitter. I know exactly how lucky I am to have gotten even this close to the brass ring. I appropriately grateful. I just figured I’d write this stuff down on the obscure off-chance it would be useful to someone just starting out.

Your pal in the Finger Lakes,

Elana

Life of a pseudo-writer

This post is not really about anything ridiculous!

OKAY WAIT, let me get the ridiculous things out of the way first:

1) Just in case I mention this later, I am telling you now so you won’t be WILDLY STARTLED – I am having a kid. I periodically get very “Oh man, what if after I have a kid it turns out that it’s like that Breeders song, MOTHERHOOD MEANS MENTAL FREEZE, and I stop being funny?!?” and Husband Guy says things like “Have you noticed that you are still kind of a jerk about the same things you would previously have been a jerk about, like when the doctor was all “Here is your baby on the ultrasound!” and waiting for you to get teary-eyed and instead you were all “Good lord, check out the size of the skull on that kid.”?

But- anyway, just so you know!

2) In conjunction with the above, I have come cross-country to visit my in-laws, who live in the Finger Lakes. This trip immediately multiplied the number of states I have been to by about four hundred.

Also, I have now experienced WAFFLE HOUSE. My husband is from the South and I guess people who are from the South think that Waffle House is The Best. In spite of my fascination with chain restaurants, I just did not get Waffle House. I mean… why does everything come with a pickle slice? (And I say this as someone who really likes pickles. AND IS PREGNANT. I am a pickle’s target demo!)

Other things I discovered on this trip: Arizona is really beautiful and also partially on fire. And FULL OF ELK who want to jump out at your car and pick fights with you! Apparently. According to the signage.

The Grand Canyon is really big. So big that your brain can’t really process the scale of it, and you think things like “I wonder why the other rim is kind of green and fuzzy” and then you realize that the fuzzy green bits are TREES and then your brain goes “…!!!! Shit, man!”

New Mexico is full of signs that say things like “FEED THE OSTRICH” or “CACTUS MOCCASINS FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY”.

North Texas is full of giant crosses! Like there’s some kind of company that makes and sells huge-ass metal crosses, and if you are a really serious Christian of a particular type I guess you buy them and put them up on your land… to make some kind of point about Jesus, or post-industrial design.

(Speaking of Jesus, I saw many semi trucks with signs reading things like “HIS NAME ISN’T THE MAN UPSTAIRS, IT’S JESUS CHRIST”, which strikes me as a really odd place to make your stand. “This far! NO FURTHER! I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE BASICALLY RESPECTFUL BUT OVERLY FAMILIAR REFERENCES TO THE LORD.”)

Arkansas’ state motto should be “EXPERIENCE OUR MOISTNESS”. The air there was so wet I kept having panic attacks. “AHHHH WHY IS EVERYTHING SO DAMP. GET IT OFF GET IT OFF.”

(However, they make up for it by frying the heck out of all kinds of fish and serving it to you in little baskets with delicious sauces, so they’re back in my good graces.)

Virginia is startlingly gorgeous. Like, really – why do you think the pioneers left there and came West? Having just made the opposite trek, I feel secure in stating: BIG MISTAKE. BIG, BIG MISTAKE. Wait until you get to North Texas, you guys.

…I am skipping states in there. But anyway! Yes. Here I am, in the glamorous Finger Lakes, where it is COLD and there are DOGS and trees and you can go apple-picking (good times) and watch the alpaca stampede (I am looking forward to this quite a bit) and buy pumpkins from honor-system farm stands and nobody locks their doors.

***

So here is the not-ridiculous part of the post: I have been thinking back on this past year of pseudo-career as a young pseudo-screenwriter. I mean, I kind of am a screenwriter in the sense that I have been able to con Manager Guy and Agent Guy into representing me, and I have specs, and I go on a lot of meetings, and people in those meetings seem to think that I am a Real Writer, and like sometimes the assistant will be all “Elana?!? Oh man, it’s so good to meet you, I loved your sample!” – which makes me think that they don’t realize that I am just some chump off the street or whatever.

BASICALLY: I am a screenwriter, but only in the sense that I am expected to function as though I am one, with the writing and the meetings and the being available all the time and the pitching, etc etc. Of course I am totally clear on the fact that nobody is paying me, so it’s not like I’m a REAL screenwriter. You know? It’s just like I have this weird full-time job I don’t actually make any money doing.

I have a couple of friends who are in this same place, and I was talking to them recently about what’s going on. We all had many of the same comments. So I thought I would write them down and post them on the internets and maybe someday in the future some young baby writer will happen on them and find them useful.

OR NOT. But it’s my blog and you can’t stop me.

Here, in any event, are some things I have noticed, a couple at a time, because I am not organized enough to cram them all in one post:

I have been to the mountaintop, and I have seen that there are like fifteen more mountains beyond it.

When you are a young writer-type person, you think that for sure getting an agent or a manager is going to be a huge deal, you will basically have ARRIVED. And you know – I am not going to pretend that it doesn’t put you ahead of the curve. Because they call people for you and tell them that you are an up-and-coming genius and they should totally meet you. And people listen to them, so that’s pretty cool. And I also don’t want to be disingenuous about how, when you’re not-repped, it seems like this huge obstacle, this MOAT staring you in the face. But my experience has been that you get repped and then realize, OH WOW, that’s just the first tiny step, you may be closer to your goal, but only in the sense that you had NO IDEA HOW FAR AWAY YOU WERE AND NOW YOU KNOW.

It’s kind of like, you’re on this uphill hike, and every time you think “Oh! THERE IT IS! THE PEAK!” you realize that it’s actually just a narrow ledge of a plateau. And you stand around there for ten minutes as you absorb, with no small amount of horror, the fact that the actual peak is still miles and miles away. And then you take a breath and set off for the next leg of the trek, and eventually you go “Whoo! THERE IT IS, the PEAK!”

And then you realize that you’re a sucker and you just did it again. And it goes on like that for some time.

The odds are so much worse than you think.

I think I have only fairly recently realized just how terrible the odds are that I’m going to make it. I do not mean to sound defeatist. I think of it more as – my friend K., who is a TV writer and is in the place I am and is also basically a genius (I mean, you guys, she is really-really-really good), told me that a Real Writer friend said to her something like, “Listen. You’re in the place now where everyone else is as good as you are. And now it comes down to sheer dumb luck.”

And that’s how it seems to me. I have done the work. I learned to write. I have learned how to take meetings and not seem like a huge dumbass. I am still not a great pitcher, but I’m not the worst, either. I am actually a pretty good writer – not the best ever, but I think I’m good enough to do the work without embarrassing anyone seriously. Blah blah blah. Fine. That’s all great, until you realize that, HOLY SHIT, now it’s you and ninety-seven other guys up for the SAME JOB.

THERE’S ONLY ONE JOB.

AND YOU’RE ALL GOOD ENOUGH TO GET IT.

It comes down to something that isn’t talent or drive or persistence. Someone’s going to get that job, but it may or may not be you.

(I think about Bull Durham a lot.)

(I also think about how nobody even knows the name of the guy who comes in behind Usain Bolt. He might as well not exist.)

Nobody tells you about the money.

A number of months ago I had a meeting with a pretty successful young director (I mean, the guy works. Do you know how rare it is for directors to work? If you’re feeling bummed about your odds as a writer, AT LEAST YOU’RE NOT TRYING TO DIRECT.) and he told me this story about how when he was working on his first studio feature, he hadn’t actually gotten any checks yet, and he had to go in to work and basically eat only the free food in the kitchen, like oatmeal and Cup-a-Soup.

And yet he couldn’t really tell anyone about it, because he was this hot young director, right? And finally he cracked and told his agent that, um, he was literally broke, could he maybe get part of that first check now…?

And it was awkward. Because nobody wants to talk about that. Because we are all weirdo Victorians who are pretending that we don’t ever think about filthy lucre.

For a number of years I worked pretty happily as an assistant, and wrote on my own time. It was FINE. I sort of miss it.

I guess I assumed that when I started to Make It as a writer, that would probably start with someone, I don’t know, buying my spec. Or else I didn’t really think about it in much detail. The point is, I never gave any thought to the fact that the best-case scenario, really, is that you will at some point have TOO MANY MEETINGS to have a job. (This is true for the people I know who are assistants… and most of the people I know are assistants. I assume that if you have some kind of job where you work at night or have super-flexible hours, this will be a different issue for you.)

So then you quit your job, and go on meetings and come up with pitches and outlines and stay home and read novels to pitch on and movies to pitch on. And that becomes your job. And you live on your savings for a while, and it’s fine.

But unless you are independently wealthy, you’ll probably run out of money long before you run out of general meetings. Of the people I know who are on this hamster wheel, one is living on cashed-out home equity, and another is married to someone who’s giving her her shot.

(I am also married to someone who is giving me my shot. I have spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about what people do if they don’t have huge savings accounts or a supportive life partner. I don’t know what the answer is. I am not exaggerating when I say that I don’t know how I would have pulled this year off if I weren’t married to a guy who is willing to do things like “Get a job not in his field and pay the rent so I can stay home and write”. I don’t really know what else to say about it, because it’s a very generous thing to do, you know? It is humbling to be the recipient of that kind of niceness. Of course it will all pay off for him when someday he needs a kidney… but still.)

And I don’t think people talk about this, because talking about being broke is TOTALLY UNCOOL, so I guess that people you have meetings with naturally assume that you are pretty fabulous, a real writer, blah blah blah. Once I had a meeting with a really very fancy executive, and I pitched him something, and then he went off on this tangent about how writers made so much more money than executives, I was making more money than he was JUST BY SITTING THERE. And finally I said, very mildly, that I didn’t actually make any money writing… and he kind of waved this off, NOT GERMANE TO THE CONVO.

(More points later, once I turn in the thing I am supposed to turn in. YES.)

Your pal in the Finger Lakes,

Elana