day 68 | ‘open mike’

May, 1996. Berkeley, CA

when my daughter was born i was working for a company that gave six weeks paternity leave. i thought i’d spend it tending to erica so she could tend to the baby. i’d heard that that was how it worked.
it turned out that erica’s mom and sister and friends were all eager to help, and babies sleep a lot, so i was left with a lot of free time.
i decided to write a screenplay.

writing a screenplay is very different than writing song lyrics. there was a big learning curve. eventually i finished a draft that i knew was rough, but at a hundred and twenty pages it felt like an accomplishment.

i had a friend who had a friend in los angeles that worked for a production company. they’d just produced their first indie feature and it was doing well. i sent them a copy of my screenplay and, surprisingly, they liked it. they gave me notes on how to improve it, and i started revising.

that’s when i realized how hard it was to get from a promising first draft to a finished script. after a couple revisions i felt like i was losing track of where i was going with it. it was a personal story and i didn’t know how to craft it into a fictionalized one.

not sure what to do i decided to take a break from it. that was sixteen years ago. still not sure what to do.