Prosperity!

One of the nicest, perhaps the nicest, thing about the evolution of my creative practice in the past ~1.5 years is finding myself much more attuned to my instincts at any given moment, and much less reliant on Process Brain to walk me through an endlessly-repeating template of how to spend my day. (Don’t worry about Process Brain, though. He still gets plenty to do.)

Because my creative time is, at best, “loosely structured” — by which I mean I know I have to do it; and I know what I have to work on; and I might even know which unit of the thing that I have to work on, to work on (uh… sentence structure much?) — a lot of it also boils down to “feel.” Does this feel like the thing? Does this feel right? What does my inner voice tell me about where I am right now?

And the most delightful of all, “what would feel best right now?”

Which sometimes gets answered by, “what would feel best right now is writing next week’s newsletter for you fine people.” Hiiii!

Sometimes, I think, Process Brain rears his head on Creative Spirit’s side of the house, and I start doing the same thing over and over again like a puppy on a treadmill without noticing it.

Then suddenly, for reasons, I do a video, or bang out a newsletter, or even have to edit a cover letter, and it’s amazing how good scratching a different part of the brain feels after so much (albeit creative! fruitful!) work of the same repetitive type.

Inching towards Bethlehem

A few weeks ago I somehow managed to give updates on, like, roughly 50% of my projects while completely forgetting the other half. For example, I forgot about TV.

TV! I’m obsessed with TV writing, more as a theoretical than as a practice, but also as a practice. (This means: I watch a lot of pilots, and a lot of them make me mad, i.e. baffled at the elegant brilliance of the contemporary practitioners of the craft.)

My most go-ready TV project is still Inchworm, my series proposal with my friend Daniel Cockburn, for which we’ve written a pilot and a fleshed-out season one and a big ol’ outline document that explains who we are and what we’re doing.

We had some activity on that project over the summer, and were lucky enough to bring it to a few of your favourite streamers; but nobody’s buying anything, and we have yet to sell. Now we’re looking at whether a producing partner or two might want to take us on as a property, to ‘worm our way into the system that way. (If you’re one of those or know one of those, I mean duh, email me.)

Inchworm — about a community of regular people who must adapt to the arrival of a gigantic, slow-moving alien object in their neighbourhood — is one of those premises that I can put in the back-burner of my mind for a period of time but then, anytime I have another look at it, I’m just alive with the possibilities of where it can be taken and what can happen with our characters and the story world.

Which means: I fucking love this show.

I’ve got two other television pilots on the go, both half-hours. One is a sitcom about a not-for-profit organization that has been in a state of near-shareability for a while; and one is a dramedy (?) about time travel that I puzzled over for most of the summer before sending it back to the drawing board. So it goes.

Prosperity!!

In the meantime, there’s money to be made. Or at least, I sure hope so, cuz I am flat broke.

hehehehe anyway. I’ve arrived at the point with my business where I can see the structure of it very clearly, which I’ll probably enumerate in more detail once I’ve actually taken ten minutes to reconfigure this web site with the right CTAs and funnels.

But basically, supplementing the “by me / for me” creative projects that I’m trying to sell, I’m offering copywriting and copy services, and have been working pretty hard on the former, since it’s a skillset that is (relatively) new to me and is quite demanding from a break-and-reset-the-bones perspective… I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but if you’ve read my work for a while, you may be aware that I do enjoy a long, elegantly comma’d, em-dash-ridden sentence paragraph that ends only when I choose to end it, which is often never, because sentences to me are like the rivers cascading over the rocks in the valley of Imladris, beautiful in that they are flowing, and melancholic in their inevitable need to reach the sea.

tl;dr, I need to get a lot punchier.

But generally: yeah. I can see how this “balanced portfolio” approach to contract work might work out. It makes sense in theory, and it doesn’t need the TV shows to sell or the novels to go to the publishers on any kind of a cadence in order to succeed.

I suspect I haven’t quite bridged the gap, financially speaking, unless I pick up two more clients immediately (hey, again, contact me!), so I’m also looking for some work in my old line, mostly because it would be fun to travel again someday. I want to see mountains. Mountains, Gandalf.

In the meantime, I started a thing a couple weeks ago after I’d had a minor anxiety attack about the risk factors in all this, which is that I just sort of wrote “PROSPERITY!” in magic pen in my journal, and like the next day, some wholly unexpected money all but fell into my lap. And then a few more bundles of same, over the week following.

Now, I know as well as you do that there is no god; and, unfortunately, that there is no Force, either. So I know this isn’t a real manifestation thing, other than that I think sometimes we forget to remind our minds to notice things when they happen, and make positive connections about them instead of negative ones. I am going to make it part of my practice to experiment with this alchemy a bit more.

Well-defined poorly-defined problems

• I was listening to Craig Mazin and John August’s podcast, as I do, and they mentioned that screenwriting is a “poorly-defined problem,” which led me to this piece about intelligence and happiness. It’s real good and, if you’re a certain kind of person, flattering. (Experimental History)
• I reviewed Demon Pond last week, newly released by the Criterion Collection, juuuuust in time for the end of Witchy Szn ’24. (Screen Anarchy)
• Further to my comments of a few weeks ago, this line — “a democratic emergency like the one we are now living through is not necessarily a business emergency” — really stuck out. (Platformer)
• If you want to feel slightly better about the hellscape, though, you could read this one on monsters, culture, and weirdness. (Slate)
• By the time you read this, my review of The Vintage Collection’s Jod Na Nawood — the first figure from Skeleton Crew! — will be online. This is the guy that got blurted out early because Hasbro accidentally shipped it to stores without telling anyone. (Giant Green Space Hand)