The Revamp — Week 3: The Self-Eating Snake
My therapist asked me what the goals of the Revamp were.
Not the little goals. She wasn't asking how many grams of protein I planned to eat or whether I had finally developed a passionate relationship with moisturizer. She meant: what exactly are you trying to do to yourself here?
I had a list.
Fitness. Health. Clothes. Grooming. Voice. Career. Marriage. Sex. Friends. Discipline. Confidence. Money. Presence. The sort of list you make when you've apparently decided being one person isn't enough work and you'd like to manage twelve departments simultaneously.
Eventually I got it down to three things: agency, self-respect and congruence.
“Congruence” is an awful word. Sounds like something you're forced to discuss during a corporate retreat while holding a dry-erase marker. But it's accurate. I want the things I say I care about and the things I actually do to stop looking like they belong to two different men.
I say I want to make movies, then I've spent years talking about being a screenwriter like I'm confessing to having a rash.
I say I want to be strong, then treat working out like Comcast customer service.
I say I want to look good, then spend years wearing things specifically engineered to make my body disappear.
I say I want a bigger life, then occasionally behave as if wanting one is gauche.
That's the gap.
Kill the gap.
My life coach, Shannon, sent me her notes after our session this week. She has known me long enough that I don't think I'm getting away with much bullshit there.
She put my current optimism at about an eight out of ten.
That got my attention because I don't remember the last time anybody could reasonably describe me as an eight out of ten on optimism without also describing the substance I'd taken.
But she wasn't talking about me walking around singing fucking show tunes. She noticed something more useful: I'm doing things.
Her phrase was “action defeats fear.”
The outreach is happening. Health stuff is happening. I'm making decisions faster. I'm saying what I actually mean more often. I'm apparently getting better at letting another person have whatever reaction they're going to have instead of immediately crawling inside their skull and redecorating the place so they'll still approve of me.
That last one showed up during the trainer hunt.
Somebody quoted me a price I couldn't afford. I said I couldn't afford it. That was it.
This sounds like an interaction mastered by most humans somewhere around the age when they're allowed to purchase scratch-off tickets, but it has traditionally been more complicated for me. I would want to soften it. Explain it. Make sure they understood I respected them. Maybe offer a small kidney so nobody thought I was being rude.
Shannon pointed out that I didn't do that.
I just said no.
There was another line from our conversation that she threw back at me in the email:
You don't have to perform being a good person to actually be a good person.
Well, shit.
Same thing with the writing. I said something during the session I don't say very often without immediately adding an escape hatch.
I am a good writer.
Not “I think I'm getting better.”
Not “some people seem to like the work.”
Not “I know I've still got a lot to learn.”
I am a good writer.
There. Nobody died.
Shannon also gave me an image for the thing that has fucked me up repeatedly over the years: the self-eating snake.
When the things I care about stop moving, I turn inward. Then the negative talk starts. Then I do less because I feel worse. Then I feel worse because I'm doing less. Eventually I'm sitting inside my own head eating myself alive and wondering why nothing changes.
The opposite turns out to be annoyingly simple.
Do something.
Then something else.
Movement creates evidence. Evidence improves the story I'm telling myself. A better story makes the next action easier. Momentum starts feeding momentum instead of the snake feeding on itself.
I hate when the obvious answer is the answer.
The best example is the screenwriting outreach.
Earlier in this project I was throwing around numbers that turned out to be incomplete because one system had the email contacts, another had LinkedIn, another had manual submissions, and then there were people I already knew. Very professional operation. NASA should call.
So we reconciled it.
The clean number is now 505 verified unique outreach targets.
That breaks down to 405 contacts in the primary outreach/CRM work, 89 additional LinkedIn or social contacts, and 11 other verified email, manual-submission or warm-network routes that weren't represented properly in the first count.
That means the number includes the forms I've sat there and filled out myself. It isn't just a Gmail sent-folder vanity metric.
Out of those 505 targets, the current verified scoreboard is 25 substantive positive responses, 14 screenplay or material requests from 13 different contacts, and four confirmed completed reads.
Four.
Shannon's next target for me is ten.
Fair enough.
The more interesting number to me is the 25.
That's 25 human beings on the other end who didn't just throw the email into the ocean. Some asked for scripts. Some had conversations. Some liked the writing but couldn't do anything with it. Some said they weren't taking material but were decent enough to point me somewhere useful. Some read one script and asked for another.
And yes, there's rejection all over this thing.
There should be.
If you're doing hundreds of targeted approaches and nobody is rejecting you, you are not doing outreach. You're journaling with stamps.
The active board now has actual movement on it.
BRICKHAUS is out on a requested full read.
KING OF THE DEAD went to somebody who had already read another screenplay of mine.
THE BATTLES OF BIRDTOWN is out with a former professor who specifically said she'd read it.
HERE FOR THIS is out.
SOULECHO is out.
KEEP DRIVING and THE RESERVIST are with a filmmaker who asked for them.
A management company read KING OF THE DEAD, said positive things about the writing, and asked for NOBODY LEAVES as another sample.
That's the part that matters. Not that 505 is some magical number. Five hundred emails can still be five hundred ways of avoiding writing if you're an idiot about it.
The point is that there is now a funnel.
At the top: people I haven't met.
Then replies.
Then conversations.
Then requests.
Then reads.
Then the tiny number of places where something might actually happen.
This week also added more deliberate submissions outside the normal email machine. ILLYRIA went to one company with the screenplay, signed submission release, CV and pitch packet. When another company's website upload wouldn't cooperate, NOBODY LEAVES went directly by email with the required release. Another full NOBODY LEAVES submission went through an industry submission platform. When a different company's web form broke, I took the same basic approach with SOULECHO: find the legitimate alternate route instead of treating a busted form like God closing a door.
There are still manual routes sitting in front of me. Trino. Manhattan. Mom's Basement. Optimism. One email route bounced and needs another approach. Paid-entry or membership-required opportunities have moved down the list because I'm not interested in solving a career problem by entering seventeen contests with a credit card.
The next manager-query follow-up window starts around the end of September. Another filmmaker gets his follow-up in early October if he stays quiet. One potentially valuable warm introduction is deliberately parked until after October 15. Austin Film Festival is sitting out there at the end of October like the next boss level.
It's not glamorous.
It is a fucking lot more real than “I hope somebody discovers my screenplay.”
I'm also still writing.
This is important because outreach can become its own narcotic. You get a response and suddenly refreshing your inbox feels like a career.
No.
The work still has to be worth reading when somebody finally asks.
Again became more of an actual movie this week. The big commercial-movie experiment got reduced to ten premises worth keeping alive instead of the sprawling landfill of concepts it started as. Losing My Edge keeps pulling at me too: James Murphy, New York around the turn of the century, rock music allegedly dying while a new scene is being born underneath everybody's nose.
A man who thinks he missed his moment, then slowly realizes he may actually be standing at the beginning of it.
No idea why that story is speaking to me right now.
Must be the dance music.
The website has been another fight.
I went through it and realized parts of it sounded like a machine trying very hard to convince strangers I had depth.
You know the voice.
Short paragraph.
Meaningful statement.
Another short paragraph.
Three emotionally adjacent nouns.
Trauma. Identity. Becoming.
Fuck off.
If I wouldn't actually say the sentence, it doesn't belong there. If the story already demonstrated something, I don't need a paragraph afterward explaining what the reader was supposed to learn. If the line seems to be standing there waiting for applause, it's probably getting cut.
The funny thing is that the same diagnosis applies to me.
Less performance.
More person.
Then I went shopping for Hollywood muscles.
This seemed logical.
I live in Georgia. Half the film industry has wandered through Atlanta at some point. There are trainers here whose business is taking actors, executives and other people with money and deadlines and making them look considerably less like writers.
Their business models are impressive.
One celebrity-oriented coaching operation sells a fully remote “total transformation” with personalized training, meal planning and weekly accountability calls. The current public price is $4,000 for three months or $6,000 for six.
Another premium studio builds around private one-on-one sessions, recommends training at least twice a week and handles nutrition through a separate dietitian service.
Another trainer I talked to offered remote coaching in the several-hundred-dollars-a-month range and roughly a thousand a month to add regular in-person work.
I'm sure this works wonderfully if Universal Pictures is trying to locate your abdominal muscles before principal photography.
Universal Pictures is not currently concerned about mine.
I had to stop confusing the best imaginable service with the service I actually need.
What I actually need is much less sexy: somebody competent builds the workouts, puts them in a spreadsheet or app, gives me progression targets, checks my numbers, looks at the occasional form video, tells me what to adjust, gives me basic nutrition targets, and once a week asks whether I did what I said I was going to do.
My realistic number is about $100–150 a month.
That is not a movie-star transformation package.
Good.
I'm not currently a movie star.
I can pick up my own dumbbells.
This may be one of the more useful lessons of Week 3.
The Revamp got bigger this week. Ridiculously bigger.
I decided the long-term target isn't “lose some weight and dress better.” I want the stupid version of the dream.
Movies people actually watch. Great work. Money. Awards. The house in the hills. A body I'm proud of. A marriage I'm proud of. Better sex. Better friendships. More books. More travel. More nerve. Interesting people around the table because somewhere along the way I became an interesting person worth inviting.
I want the whole goddamn thing.
That doesn't mean I get to behave like I already have the budget of the guy living that life.
You don't become rich by spending money cosplaying rich.
You don't become fit by hiring the most expensive trainer.
You don't become a writer by having the best website.
The object and the outcome are different things.
That feels embarrassingly important.
I'm writing this from an AirBnB in Augusta.
Dana is here for a Half Ironman. Tomorrow is deliberately a lighter day for me, which is good because the Revamp has now encountered its first proper disruption.
Different bed. Different kitchen. Different schedule. Race logistics. Travel food. The normal machinery scattered across somebody else's house.
This is where the project gets interesting.
It's easy to construct an elaborate life system at home. The supplements are where they're supposed to be. The gym is where it's supposed to be. The refrigerator contains your food. Your calendar behaves.
Then you leave town and discover whether you've built habits or just decorated your environment.
I don't need a perfect weekend.
I do need the project to remain alive while I'm here.
That's the standard.
The physical side is still behind the career side.
That's also just true.
I now know with irritating precision how many people I've contacted, how many have responded, how many asked for material, what they're reading and when I'm allowed to bother them again.
I cannot give you an equally sexy spreadsheet for my hamstrings.
That needs to change.
Otherwise six months from now I'll have a fantastic CRM, three new jackets and exactly the same torso.
No.
The body has to catch up.
So does the marriage. So do friendships. So does sleep. So does everything else that doesn't generate a notification when you're successful at it.
That's why Shannon's self-eating snake matters.
The old trap would be to look at everything that hasn't caught up yet, decide I'm failing at the Revamp and then use the failure as permission to stop.
I'm trying something different.
Look at what is moving.
Keep it moving.
Find what isn't.
Move that next.
Shannon ended her email by telling me I'd earned an A+ and all the gold stars.
I assume those are non-transferable and cannot currently be applied toward a Hollywood Hills mortgage.
Still.
Three weeks ago I was looking in the mirror thinking, essentially, what the fuck happened to me?
This week somebody who has been watching me for a while told me the energy is different.
I'll take that.
Not as proof that I've arrived anywhere. I haven't.
I'm still overweight. Still unrepped. Still operating on a budget that does not include a celebrity trainer. Still trying to learn how to say what I want without immediately apologizing for having wanted it.
But I'm moving.
And for a guy whose worst habit may be turning inward whenever life stops moving, that isn't nothing.
Feed the right fucking snake.