Week 10: Clear the Board

There is a point in every attempt to change your life where the interesting part ends and you are left with administration. I think I hit that point this week.

There was no Austin. No Ironman. No dramatic travel schedule. I had already gone blonde, so even my hair had stopped providing content. I was home, which meant the Revamp went back to being whatever the hell I actually do when nobody is watching and there is no obvious event to structure the week around.

Apparently, I clear things.

Not finish them. I have finally accepted that “finish my life” is probably not going to fit neatly into a Tuesday afternoon calendar block. But I spent a lot of this week trying to remove ambiguity wherever I could find it. Which scripts are actually on the slate. Which ones are finished. Which ones are in development. Which award belongs to what. Which query has already gone out. Which agency has already heard from me. Which bills can disappear. Which conversations need another move and which ones are just taking up mental real estate because I have not formally admitted they are done.

Clear the board.

That was most of the week.

A lot of it started with the places where the career exists publicly. ISA. Stage 32. The website. Project pages. Loglines. Posters. Awards. Statuses. All of these things have a tendency to accumulate bullshit the way a junk drawer does. You put something in there because you will deal with it later, then another thing goes on top of it, and eventually you have an online professional profile suggesting that Me, the Dog, and the Dark Fog won something at Vail that it absolutely did not win.

That seems suboptimal.

So I went through it. Birdtown stayed where it belongs. Save Point is in development instead of being treated like a screenplay just because I know what happens in it. Nobody Leaves is in a different place now because there is an option involved. Other projects are being considered. Longing for Death came off the slate. Finished things are finished. Development things are development things. Awards are the awards that actually happened.

None of this is remotely sexy, but I am starting to understand that there is a difference between being prolific and being legible. I have spent years making things and piling them up. Now I am trying to make the career around those things understandable to somebody who is not living inside my skull and does not know that Project Number Seventeen is secretly related to a conversation I had in 2023.

That requires some brutality. Not every script needs equal attention because I wrote it. Not every old project deserves permanent shelf space. Not every small piece of momentum needs to be inflated into a career event. At the same time, I cannot keep doing the opposite thing either, where I sand everything down because I am terrified of sounding impressed with myself.

The truth is fine.

The work is fine.

Make the record accurate and move on.

Roadmap Writers showed up in the middle of this and started attacking the same problem from another direction. I started their Pitch Prep course, which asks extremely simple questions that become weirdly difficult once another person is sitting there waiting for you to answer them.

Who are you?

What do you write?

What is the movie?

Why you?

What do you want?

Austin had already demonstrated that “I have written a fuckload of screenplays” is not a useful answer to any of those. Roadmap is making me turn that lesson into something repeatable rather than another interesting observation I made in Texas and then immediately ignored.

So Birdtown keeps becoming the center of the filmmaker conversation. Not because the rest of the scripts disappeared, but because a conversation needs somewhere to stand. Birdtown is the movie I want to make. It says something about what I care about. It is a much cleaner introduction to me than opening the warehouse doors and inviting somebody to wander around until they locate whatever they might like.

We worked on the logline, the pitch, the meeting questions, the materials, the actual pace at which I can say all of this aloud without sounding like an auctioneer trying to clear the livestock barn before sundown. I need practice. There are parts of writing where wandering is useful. I like wandering around inside an idea until I find the thing that hurts.

Pitching does not reward that.

What is it?

Why does it matter?

Why are you the guy?

Then shut the fuck up.

Useful.

The business side of Birdtown was teaching me something similar. I have been talking to people who can provide legitimate professional services. One proposal was around twelve thousand dollars a month. Another production-services arrangement was around four thousand a month for three months. These are not necessarily bad companies or bad people. They may be perfectly capable of delivering exactly what they are selling.

That is not really the issue.

The issue is whether buying the thing changes the position of the movie.

Earlier in this process I think part of me would have experienced a quote like that as validation. A serious company wants to work on my movie. Great. This is real now. Get the invoice.

That is how you end up spending a shitload of money to look like somebody making a movie instead of actually making one.

I do not have secured production financing. I am still trying to get the development money together. At this stage, I need people willing to help build the thing, assume some responsibility, introduce capital, create an asset that makes the project easier to finance, or put something of their own on the line.

I do not need the privilege of paying somebody twelve grand a month so I can feel more legitimate.

So the answer became no. Or, more accurately: if there is a producing relationship here, a financing relationship, a meaningful introduction, something that changes the project’s position, then let’s talk about that. If the relationship is entirely me writing checks for services, we are probably talking too early.

I am getting harder to sell shit to.

That may be one of the more useful side effects of the Revamp.

An uncomfortable amount of the entertainment business is built around people who desperately want to get into the entertainment business being sold things that feel adjacent to progress. Coverage. Consulting. Classes. Pitching. Packaging. Development. Access. Festivals. Some of those things are good. I pay for useful things all the time.

The question is becoming: useful how?

Does it change the position?

Does it create an asset?

Does it put the work in front of somebody who can do something with it?

Does it teach me something I have already identified as a weakness?

Or does it just give me another activity to point at when I want to feel productive?

That last category is dangerous because I am extremely good at busy.

I can fill every hour.

I can finish the day exhausted and still have avoided the thing that matters.

The book campaign became another test of that this week. Damages and Relief has turned into its own small bureaucratic state. There are hundreds of agents. Some take email. Some use forms. Some agencies only want one person queried at a time. Some people are closed. Some are open but obviously wrong. Some agencies have already heard from me through somebody else. Some forms have five fields. Some seem to require the literary equivalent of a background investigation and three references from former employers.

So I built another system.

The submission package stays frozen. The tracker becomes the truth. Every query gets logged. Agencies get deduplicated. Declines go in the spreadsheet instead of into my identity. The form submissions happen one at a time because that is what they require. The email side gets organized into batches.

By the middle of the week, I was well into the dozens sent, with hundreds still potentially left.

That used to sound discouraging to me.

Now I find it strangely comforting.

Hundreds left means one person cannot decide the outcome.

I have spent too much of my life treating individual doors like they were the only door. One person reads something and likes it, and suddenly maybe everything is changing. One person passes, and suddenly maybe the whole project was delusional.

That is exhausting.

A query is a query. A no is a no. A request is a request.

Log it.

Next.

One agent can think the pitch is powerful and still say the project is not right for him. Fine. That is information. Another person exists.

This is not optimism. It is arithmetic, and arithmetic is useful because it does not give a shit what kind of mood I am in.

That idea has started showing up all over the Revamp. A lot of what I am building now is really an attempt to remove the need to negotiate with myself. If the workout is already scheduled, I do not have to wake up and determine whether I identify as someone who works out today. If the query block exists, I do not have to decide whether I am psychologically prepared for rejection. If a bill is in the payoff plan, I do not need to rediscover that I owe it every time I get paid.

I paid off the Apple Card this week.

That is not exactly the kind of shit I imagined writing about when I started a six-month attempt to rebuild myself.

But it belongs here.

Debt has gravity. It limits choices quietly. One payment is manageable, then another one is manageable, then another one, and eventually an uncomfortable amount of your future paycheck has already been promised to your past self.

I want to make movies. I want to be able to take a professional risk if a good one appears. I want to be able to spend development money when it actually makes sense instead of discovering I am still paying interest on some bullshit from eighteen months ago.

So the money is part of this too.

Apple Card: gone.

There is other debt.

Fine.

Next problem.

That is probably the actual theme of this week.

Next problem.

There were creative things happening too, which is fortunate because otherwise I would have spent seven days operating as middle management for Christopher Shank Incorporated.

One idea I have been messing with started turning into something I genuinely like: a feature told entirely through the kinds of videos everybody already lives inside. Podcasts. Podcast clips. Vertical videos. Ads. Social posts. Livestreams. Online classes. Interviews. Everybody in the story has some version of themselves they are broadcasting, and at first all of these pieces seem unrelated until you slowly realize they are parts of the same thing.

Underneath it, everybody is repeating a pattern they do not completely understand.

Eventually they have to see it.

Then they have to decide whether they are actually willing to break it.

I am sure there is absolutely no reason that idea suddenly became interesting to me ten weeks into a project about trying to break my own patterns.

Complete coincidence.

Other scripts kept moving around too. SoulEcho continues to be one of those things people respond to. The Reservist has moved back toward the front of my mind as something worth finding the right producers for. Birdtown went out to another reader with an actual production perspective because I am increasingly less interested in “did you like it?” and more interested in “what scares you about trying to make this?”

That is a better question.

There are more things happening now than there were when this started.

That is objectively true.

The problem is that I am still incredibly good at eating evidence.

Something good happens and I consume it immediately.

A script gets requested.

Good. Who else?

A project gets optioned.

Good. When does it get made?

Somebody likes the work.

Good. Are they buying it?

I send seventy queries.

Good. There are two hundred more.

I pay off a credit card.

Good. There is other debt.

I get into the room.

Good. Why am I not represented?

That impulse is useful right up until it becomes the only way I know how to see my life. It keeps me moving, but it also guarantees that nothing ever gets to count.

I think that may be one of the reasons these weekly posts matter more to me now than they did at the beginning. I knew I would do this. I knew I could change things for six months and then look around and somehow convince myself nothing had changed because whatever used to be the goal would already have been replaced by the next one.

So this is evidence.

Not proof that everything is going great.

It is not.

I am still trying to finance a movie without enough money.

I am still trying to find representation.

I am still not particularly good at walking into a room and selling myself.

I am still capable of depression taking a basic task and putting it on the opposite side of a river.

None of those things vanished.

What changed is that more of my life keeps functioning when they show up.

Ten weeks ago, a shitty week had a decent chance of becoming a shitty month. One missed workout could turn into “I need to start exercising again.” One bad career interaction could become a week of hiding. One pass could make me question the entire project.

Now, increasingly, a bad day becomes Tuesday.

There is still a workout on the calendar.

There is still another query.

There is still another person.

There is still another page.

The systems are waiting for me even when I am being an asshole.

That may be the least photogenic part of changing anything, but I suspect it is the part that matters.

At the beginning, Revamp was disruption. I wanted to shake myself hard enough that I could not slide back into the same passive version of my life.

Change the hair.

Change the clothes.

Lift the weights.

Send the emails.

Go to Austin.

Do something.

Eventually, though, the new thing cannot keep feeling new. You cannot spend the rest of your life reinventing yourself every Monday.

At some point, this shit just has to become what you do.

There is nothing particularly brave about brushing your teeth if you brush your teeth every night. There is nothing impressive about exercising when Tuesday is simply a day you exercise. There is nothing courageous about sending another query after you have already sent a hundred.

Maybe that is where I am headed.

Not toward being fearless.

Toward making fear administratively irrelevant.

This week I cleared a lot of the board.

There will be more shit on it next week.

There always is.

That is fine.

I know where the eraser is.