2015 – 2016

May – It’s been one month since Augie arrived. He is an astonishingly handsome dog. He’s also the most bro-ish dog I’ve ever had. Most of my dogs have been sweet and emotional animals who wanted to snuggle. Augie isn’t aloof but he isn’t a snuggler. He likes to play. He picked up a ball and threw it, and caught it. Like he was saying, “yo, bro, let’s go play fetch.” We don’t know too much about him. Has been in foster care for 2 years but his foster mom and her boyfriend are splitting up and getting him into a forever home was something they needed to do. She was incredibly strong, bringing him over, showing him around and then leaving before her emotions overwhelmed her. He was upset when she left but after an hour he accepted she was gone. As he was sitting by the door, waiting – hoping – she would return, I got a call from Universal Cable Productions, they bought my pilot for “True Fiction.” If all goes well we’ll be shooting the show in Atlanta sometime in the fall. But I have been down this road many times before. Still though, it’s nice to have some screenwriting money. I’ve been living off my teaching income, hadn’t sold a thing since – I don’t know when – and was even delisted as an active WGA member. I was kind of at the point of giving up on screenwriting altogether so for better or worse, here we are.

June – SO glad that school is over for the term. If I were doing all this rewriting work while teaching I think I’d go apeshit. We’ve been traveling a little bit this year.First was a trip to NY for our friends wedding. I’m officially over New York. It’s like a giant dirty mall. My sister graduated from her MFA program in Portland so we had a big road trip up there. The state of California is a burnt out dehydrated husk. Truly terrifying. I love Portland though. It’s always gorgeous but man oh man do they have a lot of meth addicts wandering around downtown. What is happening? Just a few years ago it seemed like homelessness was over but then it’s come roaring back. Then we stopped in Napa on the way back down to LA and stayed with our friends who own a vineyard. Sometimes I kind of don’t understand how my life is this good.

July — Sonia, Dean’s friend from Virginia Beach, is here with her new Norwegian husband. They got married in NY last month and she’s doing a farewell to the US tour before she moves to Norway. The fence is in the back yard finally and so now Augie has free reign to run around all over the place. He loves it. He’s warming up to us more and more — such a handsome fellow.

August — oh god, Brian. We had to send a giant pitch document into Universal for our pilot and so the day we decided to work together he decides he has to rescue this stray dog. Then when the dog is a total nightmare he leaves me to deal with it. I had to run that dog all over town to various no kill shelters, pay to get it fixed on my own dime then finally go back to his place to discover he was too emotionally upset about that dog to have written the pitch document. So I stayed up late writing it and they approved it. Thank baby satan that things in the bag at Universal. Now we’ll find out if we’re getting our pilot made next month.

September — I am in Lutz visiting my mom. It’s official. The pilot is getting made in november. We have to go into casting right away. My back is starting to kill me. I’m so stressed out I can hardly stand it.

October — You know what is not fun? Casting. I’ve been spending six hours a day in a casting agents office watching folks read pages from the script of the pilot. I think though we’ve found our cast for the pilot. I’llb e going to Atlanta at the end of the month to shoot the series pilot. My spine is killing me. my leg is on fire. It’s as bad as it was five years ago and I’m a little freaked out about it.

November — there’s actually something less fun than casting and that’s location scouting. I love writing. Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled my pilot is getting made. But wow, I do not like production. A movie writer writes a script and then says, “see you at the premiere.” A TV writer has to PRODUCE their episode. So that means you have to make all the decisions alongside your director. A million decisions. I’d be fine turning 100% of it over to him. I don’t have strong opinions about shoes — but my costume designer does. She sends me these urgent ALL CAPS emails about shoes at 2AM. I’m staying in the W hotel in downtown Atlanta. Now, these are all classy problems to have, right? Atlanta is like the museum of ten years ago. We’re going to be here until January working on the pilot. There are things I do enjoy about producing the show. I’m learning a lot. We’ve got constant trouble with the local teamsters who show up at work with guns and sexually harass the women in the production office. Uh. There are signs on every business begging people to please not bring their guns into the establishment. What the fuck is wrong with these guys down here? Why are they all carrying guns? Fucking tiny dick losers. Seriously, if you think you need to carry a gun to your job driving extras to and from location in Atlanta, you’re an idiot.

We have our cast! Thank god that’s done. We had the hardest time finding black actors…IN ATLANTA! It was crazy. How is that even possible? I don’t fully understand the reasons why but every local casting agency had almost no black actors and the ones they did have were booked. Georgia is so weird. I used to come here every summer as a kid because my mom’s family is all from Georgia. I didn’t remember it being such a paranoid and hateful place but I guess I was living in a fools paradise. I get why the studios want shows to shoot here, for the tax breaks, but man. I don’t actually feel safe here. Between the gun nuts, the right-wing Christian extremists, and the difficulty getting leafy green vegetables, if our show does get picked up and I have to live here six months out of the year — yikes. Okay, classy problems. By the way, my foot hurts so bad from sciatica that when I get out of bed in the morning it sends shocking waves of pain through my body. Now I know the deal: I get stressed out, my body hurts. This isn’t because of something being wrong with me, like an injury, my pain is caused by my muscles tensing up in reaction to stress and cutting off blood flow to my leg. It’s like clock work. Still though, I can’t take it.

December — we’re in production.

January — I’m so glad to be home. Dean’s folks are here for a quick visit. We went up to wine country for a weekend. Then it was back to editing. Editing is where you are tortured with your own words. I live in an editing room on the Universal Studios lot now. I’m there all day every day. I love our cast though. They did such a good job. The only thing that’s bumming me out right now is that Brian has stripped most of the comedy out of the edit. I’m fighting to get it back in. He does this very AFI thing of crushing comedy because it feels too trivial. I know because he’s an AFI grad (and so am I) and the directors there all hate comedy. Even though we’ve made our career writing comedy, when it comes to directing he squishes it down. Then the music he selected is dirge like. I usually like Brian’s editorial choices but we really have a different take on this story. I’m not sure why. We’re doing test screenings soon so I should know if the show is going to get picked up or not.

February — Sound mixing is where you are tortured by your own words. I was not sure how much of a difference it would make but I can see that it takes the pilot to a whole different level. It feels like a real show now. It’s still not as funny as I’d like it to be but the executives at Universal love it. I had a 29 hour workday. It was the most intense and awful thing I’ve ever been through. I have never been so exhausted. We did sound and color in one day. Usually you have two or three days to do it but we were rushed and so there you go. We showed the film to test audiences in Burbank one night and that was the end of the story. The studio loved the show, the network, in this case Bravo, did not. More importantly the test audiences gave us lukewarm scores. The big note was “I thought this was going to be funny.” SO did I!

March – one thing that takes the sting out of having a studio spend six million dollars on a pilot that no one will ever see is the fact that another studio bought a pilot script from us in the last few days. So now we can start this whole absurd adventure all over.

April — jesus do you think Trump will actually be the republican nominee? They’ve got to see what a sack of shit he is, right? Like, people can’t be that stupid.