It was a good week. A few days after learning that SeaBird had placed in the HorrorOrigins screenplay contest (in the Horror Feature division, of course) and is in the running to win it, I got word that my Ireland-themed comedy pilot Gotta Be McGee has made it to the Finals in the PAGE Awards International Screenplay Competition.
I’m thrilled by this. The PAGE Awards is one of the biggest and most respected screenplay competitions. People can (and have) argued that screenplay contests in general can be arbitrary and a waste of time (and money) but the fact is, writing “spec” scripts can be a lonely business. You can get honest notes & feedback from your “writer’s group” if you’re lucky enough to be part of a good one (like I am,) but forget about getting regular friends or family to read your scripts. …and now that my agent is dead, even if there wasn’t currently a writer’s strike, it would be almost impossible to get many “industry reads” of my new work, so placing high in a few screenplay contests can get it some attention and serve as validation that the script is as good as I think it is.
Also, and I know this is going to sound hokey and ‘woo-woo’ to non-writers: When we create these characters they really are “alive” in our heads, and in a way, they really do exist – out there somewhere in some parallel/alternate reality. It feels like you’re doing them a disservice if they only live on your hard drive and in your imagination and no one else’s. With this Finalist slot in the PAGE Awards, I know that McGee and the rest of the characters in his world now exist in at least a few people’s heads and that they felt ‘real’ to those people too. It is a small victory, but it is a cherished one. I’ll take it.
I know it is only mid-September, but that Halloween Feeling is starting already. I just received word that my horror feature SEABIRD has once again placed in another screenwriting contest. It was named an “Official Selection” for this year’s Tuscon Arizona HorrorOrigins Film Festival
I couldn’t be more thrilled. We all know that writing contests can be hit-or-miss, even with the same strong script, but this placement keeps SeaBird’s streak alive: It has placed somewhere in every contest I’ve submitted it to. … and who knows? On October 28th it might be declared a “finalist”
Have I ever mentioned that Halloween is my 2nd favorite holiday? (second only to Thanksgiving.)
August already? This is the time of year when results start coming in for all those screenwriting competitions we all submitted to back in February and March. I didn’t have a lot of new stuff to submit this year, so it is nice to see the two new-ish things I did submit get a little recognition.
My Ireland-themed sitcom pilot “Gotta Be McGee” added “PAGE Awards Semi-finalist” to its list of accolades, making it now a “Top 5%” script on all of CoverFly, while my horror feature “SeaBird” also made it to the semi-finals in the “Creative World Awards” screenplay contest.
This is all good news. Especially since I haven’t been doing much/any actual “screenwriting” this year. Oh… I’ve been plenty busy writing other stuff though. I just don’t know how much of that will see the light of day: Earlier this year I cranked out two short fiction eBooks (about 15k words each) and in just the past 3 months I focused on writing just one thing: a highly personal/autobiographical project that I just finished today, which is clocking in at 80k words. I don’t know about you but 80k words in just under 3 months is, for me anyway, a lot of writing. I don’t know what to call it exactly, “memoir” seems a bit overblown, but it is definitely an autobiography… and one that wasn’t easy to write.
Actually, it was beyond “not easy,” it was actually difficult and a bit painful to write but, it just felt like it was time to write it… whether or not I ever share it with anyone or not. I think most writers know that feeling: Of being unable to write anything else until you get one. specific. thing. out of your head and onto the page. …that’s where my head was at. And now it is done. I’m not sure what I’m going to focus on next, writing-wise, but I finally feel free to choose among other projects.
In other news, my time at the LA Connection Improv Theater in Burbank is already ending. This is very disappointing news but I guess it couldn’t be helped. The group I was part of just sort of disintegrated with too many people not showing up for rehearsals or dropping out of the theater altogether. Those of us remaining were offered slots in other groups (that met on different nights) but I just couldn’t make any of those new choices work with my schedule. But damn, it was very nice to be on stage again and more importantly, be back in a rehearsal/class atmosphere with a lot of lovely, kind, and funny people. I’m going to have to find a new improv option soon because I definitely feel re-bitten by the bug and want to get back up-to-speed the way I was back when I was doing improv 5-6 nights per week. — In related news, there might be an improv teaching opportunity for me soon. THAT would be spectacular. Sometimes I think I miss teaching even more than performing.
The WGA is on strike. Still. Since my last post here, “Artificial Intelligence” has become a real threat to the livelihoods of writers and creative people of all kinds. I don’t know about you, but a future where the computers get to write poetry, create music & make art while we humans continue to do all the sh#tty jobs is not what I was expecting – nor is it what we were promised.
The strike has been eye-opening for a few reasons. As I mentioned in previous posts, my lit. agent died (from Covid) over a year ago. Since then, I’ve been trying to establish or re-establish some professional contacts with agencies and production companies on my own. I’ve made hundreds of calls in the past six months. Anyone who has tried this will tell you that it can be very frustrating to play phone-tag for days, weeks, or even months only to eventually get blown off with the standard excuse “We only accept submissions from agents.” But now here’s the thing: As the Writer’s strike reaches the two month mark, I have gotten calls from TWO different production companies that had either ignored me or blown me off for the past year+. They’re suddenly “interested in” either my horror feature or one of my pilots now, and “would I like to come in and talk about them?” – These are exactly the kinds of phone calls I’ve been working on getting for the past couple of years, but now, I have to ignore them, and I have. Because, as the son of two pro-union parents, I’m no scab.
I have also kept a New Year’s Resolution that I made back on January 1st: I have managed to climb back on stage. A few months ago I auditioned into the company of the LA Connection Theater. Where I now spend every Tuesday evening in rehearsal/class and get to do two Saturday shows a month. It still feels a bit weird. Even though I’ve been doing the storytelling and spoken word shows, open mics and even played guitar publicly, I haven’t been part of a “theater company” since my beloved bang. theater closed. My new theater focuses on short-form improv and “games” which are fun, but after years of doing long-form improv it is an adjustment to shift gears to the lower-stakes and increased “structure” of doing improv “games.” I am also still getting to know my cast mates, and getting back up-to-speed performance-wise, but so far I’m glad to be doing it and enjoying the Tuesday night workouts as much as the actual shows. We’ll see how it goes.
As I look back on my “activity log” for 2023 so far (yes, I keep an ‘activity log’) I am realizing that I haven’t written any screenplay pages this year. I haven’t even worked on (much needed) rewrites of a couple of my existing scripts. …but I have been writing. A lot. I’ve cranked out two 15k eBooks, I have done some ghostwriting and in just the past month, I’ve written over 40k words on a memoir of sorts and will likely top out over 100k words by the time my self-imposed mid-August deadline rolls around.
Maybe “memoir” is too grandiose a word. With all the writing projects that are always on my to-do lists, suddenly and without warning THIS (writing about myself) became the top priority in my mind. It could be because I’m approaching some major personal milestones, I don’t know. I just realized I had hit a point where my past keeps bubbling up in my head and affecting my present. For a while now, everything else I have been trying to write has felt lifeless and false or it just fizzled out, and I kept coming back to the feeling that it was finally time to write about myself… even if I’m writing just for myself. I think, like a lot of people, these past couple years have been a time of introspection and of questioning what it is I really want to spend my time doing. It is also a time to re-take some personal inventories and see where I have been failing myself and where I’ve been living up to my own expectations. …and maybe I’m finally ready to face and work through some stuff from my past. I’m not exactly having “fun” with this particular project, but I am feeling good about the progress I’m making on it. I also feel like I can’t work on anything else – or if I do, the work will be sub-par – until I see this “memoir” through to the end. I just can’t ignore it anymore.
If all of this sounds self-absorbed well, it is my website. The whole point of it is to post personal updates and news… but believe me: I am well-aware that the world continues to be on fire and it looks like even more difficult and tricky times lay ahead for all of us. I can only hope that kindness, cooperation and love can triumph over this moment in time where hate, intolerance and avarice are so in vogue. As a species we have so much potential that we’re not living up to.
December already. Like a lot of people, I had hoped 2022 would bring back some much-missed calm and normalcy, but that just wasn’t the case for me – nor for most of the people I know. While I understand that, from a global perspective, I’m still incredibly lucky (or blessed or privileged or whatever you want to call it) compared to the vast majority of my eight billion fellow humans, I reserve the right to say “Seriously, what the actual f#ck?!” every once in a while too.
I started the year off in January with a middling case of Covid which incapacitated me for a week – and reminded me of how much worse it could have been if I wasn’t vaccinated. This lesson was brought home for real a few weeks later when my unvaccinated literary agent died from Covid after a months-long horror show of respirators, medically-induced comas, and sorrow for his family. At the risk of sounding callous or mercenary, losing my agent at this point in my career/life is a pretty big setback. I’ve had to spend a lot of time this year hustling to find a new one – a process that is never easy in the best of Industry times… and these are not good Industry times, so the search continues.
Bigger problems surfaced when I was in a serious car accident in February. While both parties walked away, my car was a total loss and, as you can imagine, the ensuing insurance hassles that followed took up a lot of my mental/emotional bandwidth for the rest of the year (and still are, in fact) and plunged me into a spiral of anxiety of all kinds.
Oddly, this negative state of mind channeled itself into an unexpected creative place: A few weeks after the accident, I suddenly had an idea for a Horror feature. Anyone who knows me knows how out of character this is for me. I haven’t watched horror movies since I was a kid in the 80s and I don’t read horror books – at all. Heck, Stranger Things sometimes freaks me out a bit too much and I’ve never seen a single episode of American Horror Story either… call me a scardy-cat if you must. So it was extremely odd when an idea for a horror movie (which has nothing to do with cars or car accidents, by the way) arrived in my brain fully formed. Maybe the muses saw where my head was at and took pity on me.
I wrote the entire first draft in about 10 days, and then – after doing barely more than a quick spelling & grammar check, I submitted that first draft to two Horror screenplay competitions and landed in the Quarter-finals in both. Now, two drafts later, I think it is a script that needs to be read, purchased, and shot. I also took (yet another) sitcom pilot idea of mine from blank page to completion this year. It too did OK in a few contests in just its 2nd draft, and I’ve tightened it considerably since then. A feature and a sitcom pilot, not bad output for a year like this one… if only my agent hadn’t died, these scripts might already be “out” in the world, making an impression.
I also read a lot this year, as usual. I should really keep better track of what I read, but at least the kindle app on my phone keeps track of a lot of it. I focused on female writers this year and was blown away by short story collections from Joy Williams and Izumi Suzuki, as well as two ahead-of-their-time novels by the late Ann Quin. I also read a couple of Vonnegut novels I had missed and was delighted to discover Ben Franklin’s autobiography (as part of the “Harvard Classics” collection you can find for FREE for kindle) which read so vividly, you could really hear his voice in it. Some other non-fiction reads included a few books on fungi, meditation, sobriety, and things called “hyper objects,” which I still don’t quite understand. There’s more, but I’m sure you all have enough stuff on your own reading lists already.
I didn’t do any live shows of any kind this year. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I’ve been on stage exactly once since the start of the Covid-times. I have kept busy doing voice-over and character work for some friends’ various podcasts, which is incredibly fun and convenient – since I can record at home, but I find myself missing performing in front of people. I think my biggest creative goal for 2023 will be to climb back on stage because I’m starting to fear that if I don’t go back “up” soon, I won’t get back on stage at all. I also want to get back to making my weekly LA Cartoon – which after 10 years of weekly posts seemed to run out of momentum for me back in April. Maybe I was busy and not taking enough photos, but I also think it had something to do with my post-car accident state-of-mind, which I struggled with all year.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: I went through some major surgery in August to repair a damaged hip and have so far recovered pretty well from that.
…as I said, it was quite a non-standard and challenging year, but I feel like I can honestly say I did my best and got back up after every knock-down. I’m looking forward to the new year and will, as always, do my best to meet any challenges that come my way with a “yes, and…” and to be as proactive and creative as I possibly can. That’s what I’m here for.
I wish anyone reading this a safe & successful 2023.
PLANET O'CONNOR 
You must be logged in to post a comment.