Looking over the past several posts (not counting the boring blog-related ones) the casual reader might assume that this is blog about music. It isn’t really. In fact, it isn’t really about anything. It’s just a place for me to write some stuff. ‘Cause that’s what I do. I’m in L.A. because I’m thinking about being a writer.

Well, okay, I guess I AM sort of a writer. I do write stuff. I’ve been paid. I’m in the WGA. I haven’t been paid for the last few years, and I’m currently without an agent or manager (that’s the subject of another post coming soon) but I still consider myself a writer.

Just barely.

I kinda wasted last year. Fourteen months ago my manager (who seems to be looking to tag the adjective “former” into his full title — again, the subject of a post coming soon) meets with me. He says he’d like to get me off the Spec Script approach (wherein I write full-length scripts sans pay and hope they sell) in favor of the Pitch Approach (wherein I come up with story ideas and shlep them around town in hopes someone likes one enough to give me money to write it.) He says he wants to get me out into the world of pitch meetings. I say great. Let’s go. I’ve got twenty ideas and a twitchy throwing arm.

But in all of last year I pitch twice. In other words, if someone were to ask me to tick off how many pitch meetings I went to but I had just lost seventeen fingers and toes to frostbite I STILL wouldn’t run out of digits to count them on. Both meetings involve the same script. The first meeting is kind of a disaster. The second (thanks to having learned some lessons during the first) is spectacular, but still unfortunately gets me the “I love it, I wish there were something WE could do with it” response. And that’s it.

I can’t exactly give the Manager a hard time about it. I mean, I would if I could, but I don’t know where he is (again, the subject of a post coming soon.) I’m gonna go out on limb here and suggest that this Pitch Approach isn’t exactly unfolding the way he was thinking. It’s time to switch gears. I have to make up for lost time. I’ve got some writing to do. So I’ve decided it’s gonna be “Six in 2006.” As next Christmas season winds down and the good folks of Hollywood are donning their party hats I should be typing out the finishing touches on screenplay Number Six.

That’s one every other month. I’m not worried about coming up with ideas. As I said, I’ve got twenty of them. Today’s the 24th. I’ve got less than a week to finish up the first one, which, to be honest, is only a rewrite of Strange Angels, which I’ve been working on for years, but it’s a comprehensive rewrite and it’s helping me get back into the writing groove. And luckily, the next three scripts are already plotted. By the time I reach Script Number Five in September, I’ll have enough momentum to blast through till December.

You ever wondered what would happen if a guy hailed a taxi in New York and said “Take me to California?” Or what might happen to a girl driving down a highway headed home and who keeps passing the same hitchhiker again and again? Or whether Christopher Marlowe, Carole Lombard and Nathan Hale were not only still around but eating french fries in a diner on 54th Street? Or maybe you’ve actually read Blood & Dust and you want to know just how John Kelley lost his arm, or perhaps what happens to Lauren Kilkenny in Los Angeles 110 years later?

Stay tuned. You’re gonna learn some stuff.

[Oh, by the way, those cute and colorful dudes peering around my laptop are my Plush Maladies. From the left: The Common Cold, Ebola and Mononucleosis. Cute, aren’t they?]