I know that one of the reasons I am on this writing path is that, at certain moments in my development, people offered to take a gamble on my potential – and even if I wasn’t sure I could live up to it, I said yes and threw myself at the challenge. I believe that you need to watch for those moments in life, because there aren’t many of them, and they are the moments that can change everything.

There’s another piece of wisdom I’ve tried to follow in the last few years – screenwriter John August’s precept that the time you quit your day job is the moment when you absolutely, positively, cannot keep working at it and fulfill the creative obligations around you. Speculative work does not count – he’s talking about real, professional responsibilities in the arena where you want to be full-time.

Is it possible to follow both tenets simultaneously? I sure don’t know. I know I’ve gone without steady employment before in my writer’s life – sometimes it’s viable, sometimes it isn’t. The non-viable times have consequences.

The chance has arisen that I’m going to be offered a commission to write a play. A real, full-length play that would definitely be staged in a well-publicized (for the area) world premiere exactly one year from now. I would get paid to do it – not enough to live on between now and then, but certainly more than sandwich money.

This would not be a simple project. There would be travel, research, some very challenging performance elements to which the story would have to be tailored, and a branching structure that could as much as triple the length of the script. The concept is thoroughly, innately theatrical and I absolutely love that, even if the amount of labor that would go into just making the thing hang together is terrifying. If I had total freedom I would say that I needed, at absolute minimum, six months with nothing on my plate to come up with a solid first draft. As it is, they would need something they can start rehearsing and building something like 9 1/2 months from today; and I have a job to wake up for and a novel to finish and screenplays to get out to the marketplace. And, like I said – what they’re likely to offer is not enough to live on for that time, even as lean as I know how to live.

Now – there may be a way to stitch this together, and believe me I will be doing serious stitching, because I want to do this something fierce. A lot will depend on what commission they actually offer. My research into the matter has given me an expected range, and it could pay for a few months’ survival.

Financially speaking, the wisdom would be to hold the job absolutely as long as I can. My instinct as a writer tells me, though, with a hard deadline looming for something I’ve never done before, I should clean my desk of other obligations as soon as I can. The longer I hold the job, the bigger the gun I will be under to pull this off when I finally leave. And once the play’s over with – what? Will there still be a job for me? Will something else have opened up?

So much that is unknown – but I can’t let that frighten me. I know how rare a moment like this is.

That opportunity comes not through open competition, but because of a personal connection of mine. It’s not that they have nothing upon which to base their opinion that I can do the work, but I also didn’t exactly have to beat out the masses. The ultimate satisfaction for me has always been to have the work speak utterly for itself – no personal bias, no author’s note, just another clump of words pulled off the stack and studied only on its merits.

Early last month I was building an attack plan for America’s second- and third-tier literary journals with my short stories. I have no connections at all in that world, and the short stories I’ve written have not been exposed to anyone outside a few friends, so this is about as cold and naked as submissions get.

I set that goal aside when I got off on my recent writing streak; but before I did, there was one on-line quarterly that was accepting stories with a particular theme, with a deadline that was about two days away. The story that best suited it was the one I felt was the riskiest, the most esoteric, the most out of my comfort zone, so since it seemed so unlikely it would get published anyway, it would cost me nothing to just take that shot.

Last night, while at a birthday dinner with my family, my phone buzzed – they want the story for their upcoming issue; which is publishing next week. My first-ever submission of fiction, and it connected. I am still trying to fathom that. I gave myself a 5% chance at best after my plan of submitting four or five stories across forty or fifty publications. By that standard, this is simply not a sane result.

I admit I was in a grumpy mood most of the day. I didn’t sleep well, I’m pessimistic about my birthdays, and I was unusually out-of-sync at work. But during the family dinner expedition, my phone buzzed, I saw that e-mail, and suddenly everything was re-oriented in a positive way.

In one week, I will be a published author of fiction. And I did it without networking or nepotism or because I just happened to be around with a pen. Gifted as I am at kicking the pillars out from under my own accomplishments, it’s hard to wreck this one.

I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present. Although I did get some books and Blu-Rays and an iPod dock after that.

Klosterman, in a pretty hilarious 2005 Esquire profile of Val Kilmer:

“The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is mildly Zen; there are road signs that say, GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST. This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice.“

And here’s me, after Day One of my 2007 cross-country road trip:

“There’s a sign that appears regularly along I-40 in New Mexico. It reads “Gusty Winds May Exist“. I find that unusually philosophical for a highway warning.“

Of course, Klosterman spun a better joke out of it, and effectively used it as a wraparound for the whole piece. But that’s why he makes the big bucks.

I am definitely bound to see it this weekend. Whether I see it in 3D or not is questionable, since it’s so unreliable these days. But I’ll be there, hoping for packed, laughing houses of moral degenerates. That’s what we were aiming for from the start.

Will my name be in the end credits? I have no idea, but odds are way, way against it. Will I make any money if it is successful? Not a dime. But I still feel a measure of pride, and hope the final product is something like what we envisioned back at the start.

So what did I do?

Well, when you see the producing credits, two names should appear somewhere in the list: “Marc Toberoff” and “J. Todd Harris”. They were my bosses during the last stop on my development career, at a company with the thrilling name of Intellectual Properties Worldwide. Marc was an IP attorney who specialized in finagling a rights position on old movies, TV shows, and the like and developing big screen versions for studios. I already thought we were doing the devil’s work at the time, but when it comes to branded titles, we were just ahead of the curve.

My job was director of development, the definition of which shifts from company to company, but I always saw it as working full-time on the creative side of the producer’s workload. The business/legal/dealmaking side, the logistical/physical production side, other colleagues of mine focused on that; I cared exclusively about the creative content. This ranged from conceiving of and drafting story treatments to shop to writers, to trolling E3 and Comic-Con for new properties, to keeping my eyes and ears open for new writing and/or directing talent, to reading piles and piles of old books whose authors we represented, on the off chance we’d overlooked gold.

We had a trio of horror titles into which we invested a lot of time and effort: It’s Alive, C.H.U.D., and Piranha. For awhile after my script sale I was actually going to write C.H.U.D., and had done a new mythology/backstory for the creatures along with some preliminary outlining. But I decided that it wasn’t the best idea for me to be doing (long story, won’t get into it in public).

Instead I brought on Ashley Miller & Zack Stentz, a pair of awesomely nerdy and talented writers who have since gone on to write for The Sarah Connor Chronicles as well as writing the upcoming Thor and X-Men: First Class movies. They wrote a far cooler script than I ever would, and for all I know it’s gathering e-dust on some hard drive somewhere, because I have seen no news that it’s actually in active development.

We were getting a Piranha script from Josh Stolberg and his partner Pete Goldfinger. J. Todd and Josh went way back, and Josh and I had become friendly as we tinkered with different projects over the years. His career was blowing up, his scripts Good Luck Chuck and The Passion of the Ark (which got so mangled on the way to becoming Evan Almighty that his name’s not even on it anymore) were blowing up the spec market to the tune of seven figures. But he kept working with us because he liked the projects we brought him, and he liked the notes he got from me. Having worked on both sides of the table, I can tell you what an incredible currency good notes and a d-exec who understands what you are doing can be.

Josh and Pete wrote this sprawling, disgusting, hilarious spectacle with dozens of major characters and page after page of bloody “gags” built around the premise of prehistoric giant piranha feasting on Spring Breakers at Lake Havasu. Unlike the normal process, they were actually turning in scenes and sequences as they were written, rather than making us wait for a full script.

I remember the first sequence they wrote involved four young teen smoochers having a sexy night out that turns so, so bad the next morning because of a pair of handcuffs and a malfunctioning parking brake near a cliff over the water. I think the first draft of that scene alone ran over 30 pages. A lot of my job was coaxing all this enthusiasm for combining hot teens with violence (worth noting: Josh went on to write this year’s Sorority Row remake) into shape as a lean and nasty feature that, nonetheless, played fair to all its plotlines and characters.

Probably my biggest achievement was a kind of family tree for all the characters they had created – combining and eliminating some, and tracking their movement geographically and chronologically through the plot. One character in specific I created out of thin air to solve a number of problems they had written us into out of sheer no-looking-back zeal. I’ll be watching to see if he still exists in the filmed version.

Once we had a script that got us all excited, it was time to find a director. Knowing that we were coming out of the Roger Corman tradition (this franchise alone helped launch the likes of Joe Dante and James Cameron), it just seemed to make sense to honor by matching it with an up-and-coming director.

So I trolled the usual websites, looked at what was playing at horror/sci-fi festivals – sought out what was getting people excited. From that I culled a list of 6-10 directors we wanted to get to know better. One of those names was Alex Aja.

At the time, Aja’s French horror film High Tension had been acquired for American distribution, but it was an open question whether it would actually be released (it was eventually trimmed for an “R” rating). His agents set up a private screening of the movie for Todd and I near our offices in Beverly Hills. We knew basically nothing about the movie going in, which really helped maximize the effectiveness of the twists. Todd in particular was almost balled-up in his chair by the end; but we both did our share of cringing.

The next day we were having afternoon coffee on a restaurant patio with Alex and his writing partner Greg. I was young for a Director of Development, but Alex is even younger than I am; but he’s a second-generation filmmaker and grew up around the process. He was already very composed and savvy, and talked about his recent meetings with Wes Craven’s company that eventually led to his remake of The Hills Have Eyes.

Our first instinct was to pitch him C.H.U.D. – and he actually really loved the script and said he wanted to do it. So, film nerds, there’s a movie that would have rocked but will never be – C.H.U.D. remake directed by Aja from the writers of Thor.

As we got to talking, we also mentioned Piranha, and once he read that one he loved it even more. I think it’s because Josh and Pete put children in jeopardy so shamelessly. Alex enjoyed that.

He got busy with Hills, so we never got too far into the project before I left the job. From time to time Todd would tell me that it was still on, but Aja kept making other films and I really believed there was no way he was still going to be making horror movies by the time our number came up. But – and I give Todd a lot of credit for this, he’s the king of slowly, quietly pushing a movie forward for as long as it takes – suddenly there they were, posting pictures from the set out in the desert. Alex and Greg re-wrote the script, and I don’t know how extensive it was or whether they will be sharing credit with Josh and Pete, but most of what I’ve seen in the trailers has been at least in the ballpark of what we came up with way back then.

Todd also exec-produced The Kids Are Alright, and that has to be one of the stranger pairs of features for a producer to have in multiplexes at the same time. But each, in their way, should be considered a real crowning achievement for him. After dozens of indie films – many of which never even got to theatres – he’s got a classy, breakout hit that’s going to be in the conversation around Oscar time. And he’s also got Piranha 3-D, which seems to be pushing all the right buttons with its hungry target audience; and more shockingly still, is getting good reviews.

And, while I sometimes tell the anecdote about writing the story coverage that may have helped The Informant! turn into a Steven Soderbergh film, this is indisputably the biggest movie in my career to date that I can honestly say has a few of my fingerprints on it. Whether or not you see it won’t benefit me in the slightest; but hey! See it anyway!

So, for practical, reader-friendly spec writing, 90-115 is the range. Comedies, thrillers, and horror movies traditionally run on the shorter end of that scale since they are meant to be more energetic than hefty dramas or romances. As I’ve said before, I targeted 105 for this one but am bound to overshoot that – but that’s what happens in first drafts and I don’t fear the cut-down that will undoubtedly follow.

When I cross 90, basically at any point I could make a bomb go off, have someone say “Good night, sweet Prince!“, write “FADE OUT” and BINGO – I’ve written a feature screenplay. There’s a sense of power in that, because it’s like the labor part of it is accomplished triumphantly, now it’s just about writing the pages the story needs to be the best first draft of itself it can be.

I read an essay by Francis Ford Coppola today where he underlines the oddity that people write screenplays on spec at all. A screenplay is, after all, in great measure a technical document, filled with jargon, whose purpose is to tell the lighting department what to put on the truck each day. And to spend so much time creating that document without writing a good STORY first is startlingly premature.

This falls under the pick-your-poison heading – outline, treatment, prose summary, what have you – but what he’s advocating is that you get the creative elements right before you start swimming in the jargon. Because it’s so very easy to get all that stuff right and fool yourself into thinking that because of it you’ve written a good script.

Since Hollywood is relying more and more on stories from other media on which to base their movies, and there’s little market left for spec, this is not such a terrible thing to keep in mind. The last short story I wrote, as it happens, had been living in my brain for many months – as a short film idea. And if I ever do film it, I think having written it down like this first is going to make it better.

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A vital part of building your routine in LA will involve finding sanctuary places – places where you can kill time between meetings and hopefully access your three lifelines – free-or-cheap parking, electricity, and Wi-Fi.

Coffee shops come to mind. Many will validate, and unless they are trendy they won’t kick you out after a half-hour. But all those Chai smoothies add up – in a month you could end up spending the equivalent of two tanks of gas.

Going to the movies is an option – you are a writer, so seeing a movie is ALWAYS an option. But once you factor in travel time, parking, and the show itself, it’s likely to eat up three hours. Sometimes that’s too big a block – your next meeting might be before that, or maybe you’re just trying to wait out rush hour.

Now the Beverly Hills Public Library – that’s a Sanctuary spot to always keep in mind. It’s close to West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Westwood, which is a pretty healthy concentration of potential meeting sites. They have a large, rarely-full parking deck that provides two hours of absolutely free parking during the day. Since you are a normal human being who doesn’t carry four dollars in quarters in your pocket, this is a great alternative – I’ve had to duck out of meetings to feed parking meters before. It does not make a good impression. I had to borrow change from a manager before – that made an even worse impression.

Their study room has plenty of outlets, the Wi-Fi is free, and the atmosphere of quiet is enforced by the most ardent shaming glares. You will seriously feel self-conscious if your mouse button is loud.

If you arrive after 5pm, the parking is free – you could keep your car there all night if you need to. If you’ve got a dinner or drinks meeting in the 90210, that takes care of one of your biggest headaches right there. The library may close at 6, but there’s a Coffee Bean seven minutes’ walk down the street – again, free Wi-Fi.

These are the pieces of knowledge that will help you navigate here – knowing that you can park along northbound San Vicente just below Melrose for two hours during the day; knowing that the north-south streets north of Sunset near LaBrea are permit-only at night, but there’s an east-west street that is free. This town can nickel-and-dime you to death before you’ve even had your first $9 cocktail. You’ve got to find ways to save your brain for bigger problems.

I did not imagine it would be that simple for someone who keeps denying he is an actor to get to 3.

I loved the show – heard some great blues/roots influences and appreciated that there was absolutely no lolly-gagging, they just stomped their way from song to song with style and joy. It was exuberantly lo-fi without being punk; but E (lead singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist/only permanent band member) could turn it lush and melancholy in an instant with no warning. They made at least one new fan in the crowd.

Adam indicated he had a robust collection of Eels music on his computer and offered to share some of it over. And it tied into this nagging big thought I’ve been having – I wouldn’t be paying for any of it. File-sharing is as inevitable now as mix tapes; I’ll be one of those old fogeys who has to explain that when I was a kid, we would hold a tape recorder up next to the radio to capture a song we liked. Then I’ll have to explain what a tape recorder was.

And to a marginal degree I see no problem with that. You want there to be a little deepwater churn going on in a culture – back-channel communication, as it were. Mystery Science Theatre 3000 included an exhortation in the end credits of every episode to “Keep Circulating the Tapes” – and the health of that cult can, I believe, be directly attributed to the fact that the fans listened and obeyed. I try to hold myself to certain standards when it comes to piracy – after all, I hope to make a living at creative work, which sort of requires that not everyone in the world give up on paying for it just because they’ve got high-speed Internet. Adam balances his music downloading karma by buying band merch at shows – he figures they see a higher percentage from that than the album – and he’s probably not wrong on the numbers.

But whatever your personal ethical system, I don’t think legal sanction or public shaming can really stuff this thing back into Pandora’s Box. In fact, I think that the more connected the world gets – the faster the speeds, the greater the storage capacity, the easier for n00bz to comprehend – the more piracy is going to become as common as bubblegum. And it won’t just be TV episodes; you’ll be ripping whole filmographies in minutes with a click.

We have already passed the threshold where you can – easily and for just the price of a computer – download and store more professionally-produced entertainment content in your lifetime than you can actually consume in your lifetime. We have become Digital Hoarders, and unlike other hoarders who have the decency to live with their filthy habit in loneliness and shame, Digital Hoarders are some of the cockiest dipsh*ts you’ll ever know. Oh, you’re superior to my excitement about seeing a movie because you already got the work-print version on Bittorrent? It must be so awesome to not love anything.

A huge slice of American culture is about sameness. McDonald’s rose to dominance in the freeway era because road-trippers wouldn’t have to gamble on what they were going to get there – the restaurant was going to be clean, inviting, and the food was going to be the same as the last McDonald’s. You can make up your own mind about whether or not Coca-Cola is the greatest soft drink ever created – but its success in this generation has less to do with taste superiority and more to do with leveraging its omnipresence – walk into any movie theatre or restaurant, and you don’t have to wonder what your beverage is going to taste like. I respect that – most people can barely deal with the mysteries they have, they don’t want to be drinking mystery as well.

And the corporate megalopods that control the movie industry are gradually applying the same approach via digital distribution. Instead of making film prints and stuffing them in canisters, “distribution” will eventually just be a matter of pushing a button and streaming a perfect digital print to authorized theatres. In the days of Gone With the Wind, some small towns had to wait as much as two years to see the movie they anticipated so feverishly, because there were only so many film canisters, and they weren’t leaving the theatres they were at until the people there had their fill.

We can’t go back to that, and I don’t think we should. But since, for the modern consumer, there will be less labor and less expense involved in just taking the content, and the resolution of the content on-line will get closer to broadcast quality, what you are effectively doing nowadays when you go to the box office is not buying a ticket for a show, but renting the theatre’s giant screen for a couple of hours. And it will be exactly the same movie here as it is in Portland, Maine.

But the sameness that makes Coke dominant is going to be ruinous to media – because you can’t burn Coke to a DVD. In essence, to restore value to content, content will have to evolve in a way that refutes the all-access multiplicative sameness offered by the bits universe. More and more, people will only buy tickets to things that they HAVE to be there for.

This means, for people who want to make a living at this, more live happenings – more concerts, more live theatre, more special celebrity appearances, more merch, more improvisation, more festivals, more people banging drums on street corners. People – I truly believe – still YEARN to gather and have moving experiences as one-off tribes-of-the-entertained. And it is our job to deliver them that, even if technology has made the record-and-replicate aspect of what we do increasingly valueless. We had to know that was inevitable, didn’t we? And it requires an adjustment, but I’ll survive it better than the guys in the office towers, because I never thought of myself as a content recorder and replicator, and I’ve never needed to become a millionaire from doing this to consider myself a success.

The warm-up act for The Eels was a ventriloquist. This was a horrible idea on so many levels. He wasn’t even a good ventriloquist – just a lot of lame “blue” jokes and every over-exposed bit in the book (ooh, you can drink a liquid while singing, amazing!) The crowd got hostile. I thought it was as bad as it could be when he pulled out his Sarah Palin puppet – his “Sarah Palin” voice was pretty much exactly his; so if there was a joke where he was suggesting Sarah Palin is a drag queen, I missed it.

But no, the worst part was when he asked for volunteers from the crowd so he could do a human dummy routine (where he pinches their necks to make them open their mouths and say “funny” things).

For his dummy, the crowd gave him a kid with Down’s Syndrome.

Now, as I said to Adam at the time – if it were Andy Kaufman on stage at a moment like that, he would have made damn sure he left the stage never allowed to perform in Orange County again. As it is, the ventriloquist panicked and replaced the kid as soon as he realized what was happening. But for a few seconds there, we were in the midst of a moment of amazing, accidental, un-recreatable danger.

And as terrible as that opening act was, I count it now as part of what made it worth the price of admission. Really – you just had to be there.

For the last two weeks I’ve been deep in to a good quality writing binge. It may have been triggered by the rush of creative energy from doing the Fast & Loose show – even if that didn’t play a role, the amazing experience is still paying dividends in other ways. But since then I’ve pinned 32 new pages to this screenplay, and we’ve got lots of daylight left over here. 2-3 more weeks and I should have a draft; and so much of my creative energy has gone into the novel over the last year (for obvious financial reasons) that it’s been far too long since I got to celebrate a finished screenplay.

The other impetus I’ve considered is that I’ve just reached a point of uncontainable annoyance that this script doesn’t exist yet. Every producer to whom we’ve mentioned the idea has one of those YEAH, why isn’t THAT a movie yet? forehead smack moments. That’s one of those subtle signs that you have an idea that could be worth money; and I’ve been beaten to the punch on those more times than I care to count.