GROW

Hello, friend!

I took some time off from the newsletter this summer, for a variety of reasons.

I wish I could tell you it was because I’ve been so busy with all of my TV/film projects, but that hasn’t been the case. I’ve been pushing the same few projects I talked about all year and while there has been some progress, there haven’t been major developments that gave me something of substance to talk about.

I’ll give you a quick rundown:

THE KICKOUT - That’s the novel. It sounds like we’re going to take it out to publishers after Labor Day. Maybe there will be some news to talk about by the end of the year, but if nothing else, I’ll be able to tell you what I learn from the process. Uncharted waters for me.

ROAR - This is my current feature spec. We’ve had an amazing producer on board since November, and in early July we attached a great director. I spent a few days doing a pass to incorporate some of his ideas and now we’re strategizing the next step.

HALF-LIGHT - This is my series pitch/spec. I have a producer and director attached that I love. We did a short round of pitches, all passes so far. The spec got reads that turned into pitch meetings, but there are a couple of elements in the pitch that turned out to be common stumbling blocks for buyers. So, now I’m at a crossroads. I can keep spinning the wheel in hopes that somebody else thinks those elements are as cool as the director and I do, or… I can think of ways to address the stumbling blocks and maybe remove those obstacles.

There are plenty of stories like how The Duffer Brothers pitched STRANGER THINGS all over town and got pass after pass until finally somebody said yes. But I also think of the people in these pitches as the very first audiences who experience the story. It’s a chance to see what works and what doesn’t, where people lean in, and where they tune out. Broadway shows get rewritten all the time after backer’s auditions. So, maybe it needs one more stage of development. Maybe it’s still evolving.

It’s a tricky business. Changing it for purely mercenary reasons, or out of financial desperation, is a surefire way to end up spending a year of your life on a show that you hate. Your work deserves better. My rule is that I have to love the new version more than the previous one. I’m not quite there yet.

The main reason that I haven’t written the newsletter for a while is that the health and wellness journey takes up most of the free time that I used to spend on it. Turns out it is incredibly time consuming to go the gym consistently, shop for groceries multiple times a week, cook every meal at home, clean after said meals, then get out and walk around the Rose Bowl after dinner instead of sitting on the couch. It’s been worth it though. I’m down a little over fifty pounds and all of my issues with my knees have been resolved. I’m feeling stronger and more mobile by the day. But I think the biggest benefits have been internal.

I’ve written a lot about self-talk in this newsletter. I think I probably talked about it in the very first couple of issues. It was one of the biggest areas I had to address when I started losing weight. My self-talk in every other area of my life was overwhelmingly positive, especially when it came to my work or my creativity. When it came to my weight, I was a real asshole to myself.

After the first month or so back in the gym, I stopped wearing my headphones. It was one more hour out of the day I could spend without being tethered to technology. That meant I was in constant conversation with myself. I coached myself through lifts. I pushed myself. Hard. And I learned to be more positive. My self-talk improved.

I’m big on mantras. For a few weeks, my mantra was, “Move, motherfucker.” I said it to myself on mornings when I was procrastinating about going to the gym. I said it to myself when I was too tired to finish a set, or when I thought about turning back around one mile into a three-mile walk. I liked it because it was stern but not abusive. It meant business.

Still, I knew I needed something more positive for the long-haul.

One day it hit me.

Why am I doing resistance training? Because I want to grow muscle and strength.

“Grow.”

“Grow” is my new mantra.

I say it every day now, in the gym and in daily life.

When I feel like I can’t do one more rep. “Grow.” When I get yet another pass on a project. “Grow.” When I feel stuck creatively. “Grow.” When I worry that I’m never going to have another job in the entertainment industry. “Grow.”

It’s a reminder that resistance is an opportunity.

It’s a command to actively pursue things that are outside of my comfort zone. Maybe I’ll never get another staffing meeting, or sell another pitch, or script. Okay, what are my options? The state of the industry is forcing me to grow.

It’s also a prayer that these creative seeds will take root and flourish.

There’s one more bit of self-talk that I do regularly now. If I hit all my targets for the day, if I worked out and stuck to the nutrition plan, at some point in the evening I’ll catch my reflection in the mirror and say, “Proud of you, kid.” It’s a surprisingly powerful motivator. Give it a shot sometime.

By the way, even though I wasn’t writing the newsletter, I was still thinking about it a lot. At least a few times a week I would save a link to my notes app of something I wanted to share with you. At this point there are way too many, but I wanted to pass on a few of my favorites.

I loved Adam Moss’s book, The Work of Art. It’s a series of interviews and deep dives into the artistic process. As much as I enjoyed Rick Rubin’s book about creativity, in the end I found myself craving some more nuts and bolts stories from other artists in the trenches. This book was a gold mine for that. I highly recommend it. One of my favorite bits was discovering this quote from Virginia Woolf:

“As Virginia Woolf wrote in this killer description of creative turmoil, “anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”

Excerpt From

The Work of Art

Adam Moss

I came across this unbelievable story from the New York Times, about an artist who has been working for the past fifty years on one project, moving massive amounts of Earth to create a mile long city in the desert. New bucket list item!

RIPLEY is one of my favorite shows of the past few years. Here's a link to a great article on Deadline and video with the creative team about the level of detail involved and the depth of thought put into every element.

If you’re not following Marc Guggenheim’s newsletter, you should be. Per The Work of Art above, I saved a link to this issue from back in June where he gave us a glimpse into the early notes from his novel (which I now possess but haven’t read yet) and the pitch for ARROW. In it, he also talks a bit about his process, which I really dug.

In the work of art spirit, I thought I’d share a little bit about my current feature spec, STOKE. It’s a crime fiction story in the vein of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen, the stuff I loved in my early twenties. It’s been a little bit slower process because I’ve been doing my “rolling outline” style of writing, where I spend a few days brainstorming the next handful of scenes, then I write those scenes and put myself in the head of my characters to figure out where it goes from there. I find that this process satisfies my deep desire for subversion and surprise.

After ROAR, THE KICKOUT, and now STOKE, I realize I’m on a kick of writing “bad motherfucker stories.” I’ve actually been a fan of these stories since I was a little kid, ever since I first heard “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” and “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim,” by Jim Croce. I’m soft like Country Crock so I get a little vicarious thrill out of writing someone completely the opposite.

One of the things I wanted to do early on was, as Glen Mazzarra says, “Give my characters the stage.” I introduce my two main characters in the first twenty minutes by giving them each a kind of set piece scene that is entirely devoted to telling you about their nature. Since Substack has a new video feature, I figured rather than sharing pages I would just read a sequence to you. I recorded this a little over two months ago, but most of it still sticks:

That’s all for now, hope you’ve been having a great summer!