The Revamp, Week 4: I Accidentally Turned It Into a Career Plan

I made a promise when I started this thing.

No restarts.

That was one of the rules.

You don't blow Tuesday and decide you'll become a new person Monday. You don't eat like shit for three days and wait for the first of the month. You don't miss the gym and then make yourself do some miserable punishment workout to atone for having a human body and a calendar.

The next thing is just the next thing.

Tuesday follows Monday.

I liked that rule when I wrote it.

Now I have to actually use it.

This is the end of Week 4. I'm calling it the end of Quarter One because four weeks seems like a reasonable place to stop, look around and see whether I have been doing the thing I said I was going to do.

There is another rule for this review.

If I didn't mention doing it, it didn't happen.

No reconstructing a better month from vibes.

No, I'm pretty sure I stretched a couple times.

No, I read some articles, that probably counts.

No credit because I spent six hours designing an excellent system for doing something I did not then do.

Receipts only.

Which creates one immediate problem.

I have a shitload of receipts.

They're just mostly for the same department.

I crossed 1,000 pieces of screenwriting outreach this week.

One thousand.

There's a number I can prove.

I can show you emails. Queries. Follow-ups. Submission forms. Producers. Managers. Agents. People who said no. People who said yes. People who requested scripts. People who read one thing and asked for another thing. People who disappeared. Addresses that bounced. Forms that broke. Conversations that are still alive.

One thousand attempts to make something happen instead of waiting for something to happen.

Four weeks ago, this was one of the things I wanted to fix most.

I have spent a stupid amount of my adult life writing screenplays and then behaving as though finishing one caused a little beacon to light up over Marietta, Georgia that Hollywood could see from space.

SCRIPT COMPLETE.

PLEASE DISPATCH CAREER.

Turns out that's not how it works.

So I stopped waiting.

This part of the Revamp worked.

Maybe too well.

Because if you ask what happened during my first four weeks, I can tell you exactly how the career changed.

If you ask how many books I finished, the answer is easy.

None that I've told you about.

So none.

How consistently did I meditate?

No receipt.

How much breathwork?

No receipt.

Stretching?

No receipt.

How many weeks of lifting?

Come on.

Running?

No.

The first week I explicitly reported that I did no movement at all. No running. No lifting. No yoga. Nothing.

I also didn't read.

Then I made a plan for the next week.

Of course I did.

Planning things is one of my great gifts.

I can plan the absolute shit out of a thing.

There were workouts. There was Stoner. There was skincare. Tooth care. There were routines and trackers and sensible gradual progressions. There was a whole adult system designed to prevent me from trying to become Batman on Monday and requiring orthopedic surgery on Thursday.

Then Week 3 came around and there still wasn't enough evidence to say the physical side had become real.

There was a workout written down.

That is different from a workout.

There were books assigned.

Very different from books read.

There was meditation on the list.

You may be detecting the pattern.

Meanwhile the career kept moving.

The website kept moving.

The scripts kept moving.

The outreach number kept climbing.

New projects kept appearing because apparently twenty-something screenplays were insufficient protection against the horrifying possibility that I might someday have nothing to write.

And I think that's where I fucked this up.

Not by failing.

By succeeding too hard at the thing I already knew how to use as a hiding place.

I've been scared of running out of time to write for years.

Maybe because I started taking it seriously later than I wish I had. Maybe because film careers take forever. Maybe because I can do the math on my age whether I want to or not. Maybe because every year produces another crop of twenty-three-year-olds who have apparently written a brilliant screenplay, directed a movie on an iPhone and become best friends with A24 before I finished breakfast.

Whatever the reason, somewhere in me is a clock.

It says WRITE.

Then it says SEND IT.

Then it says YOU HAVEN'T SENT IT TO ENOUGH PEOPLE.

Then somebody asks for something and the clock says ANSWER THEM.

Then somebody doesn't answer and the clock says FIND SOMEBODY ELSE.

The Revamp was supposed to make my life bigger.

I found a way to use it to make the same part of my life even bigger.

That is funny.

It's also exactly the kind of shit I do.

Take the thing I'm already anxious about.

Build an industrial process around it.

Call the increased efficiency healing.

A thousand pieces of outreach is real progress.

I'm proud of it.

I'm also not going to pretend that emailing one thousand people somehow loosened my hamstrings.

This was supposed to be a physical project too.

It was supposed to be reading books instead of inhaling fragments of the internet all day.

It was supposed to include breathing on purpose occasionally, which you would think would be achievable since I have remained alive for forty-three years and have considerable experience with breathing.

Meditation.

Mobility.

Posture.

Sleep.

Actually leaving the house sometimes for reasons that cannot become a meeting.

Being present with people.

Doing things to my body besides transporting my brain to another laptop.

The website checklist is full of this stuff.

That's what makes looking at it now useful.

The career portion increasingly looks like evidence.

A lot of the rest still looks like a shopping list for a person I have not become.

I could make myself feel better about that.

I could count research.

I could count all the trainers I looked at.

I could count conversations about workouts as fitness.

I could count owning Stoner as reading Stoner.

I could count deciding I should meditate as a surprisingly advanced form of meditation where the meditation occurs entirely in theory.

I could do that.

But then what exactly is the fucking point of keeping a record?

Week 1 was supposed to establish the baseline.

It did.

Unfortunately one of the baseline findings was that I wasn't exercising or reading.

Week 2 was supposed to build the system.

We built an excellent system.

A system without behavior is interior decorating.

Week 3 was supposed to find out whether any of this survived real life and travel.

The career did.

A lot of the other stuff didn't leave enough evidence for me to claim it survived anything.

Week 4 was supposed to be about coming home without starting over.

Well.

Here I am.

Home.

And I really want to start over.

That's how I know I can't.

I want to take the first four weeks, declare them the beta test and announce that the real Revamp begins tomorrow.

New calendar.

Cleaner checklist.

Revised routine.

Maybe a special notebook.

Nothing says personal transformation like buying office supplies because you didn't go to the gym.

But I promised.

No restarts.

And the promise doesn't mean much if the only time I honor it is when I'm doing well.

So Quarter One gets the grade it gets.

Career?

A.

Maybe an A+ for effort and an incomplete on results because I cannot personally force somebody to buy a screenplay.

Creative work?

Good. Plenty happened there.

Public voice?

Better. Considerably. I've started saying things that actually sound like me instead of running every sentence through an imaginary committee that might someday employ me.

Style and presentation moved some.

I got more deliberate. Things left the closet. Other things came in. The picture is getting clearer.

The body?

F.

Reading?

F.

Meditation, breathwork and stretching?

F.

Not because I tried and failed spectacularly.

That would almost be better.

Mostly because I let other things eat their time.

That's different.

And it raises a more uncomfortable question than whether I can stick to a workout program.

What happens when you're high-performing in one part of your life and use that performance to excuse neglect everywhere else?

That's basically how I got here.

It is also uncomfortably close to something Chuck Palahniuk said that I haven't been able to shake.

We did what we were told.

Went to school.

Got jobs.

Performed.

Behaved.

Were good at being good.

Then some of us got far enough down the road to notice that the reward we'd been promised wasn't waiting there.

Now what?

Keep playing because we're good at the game?

Pretend we don't know?

Go backward?

Or do something that makes less sense according to the rules we've spent our lives learning?

I think that's part of what this project is actually about.

I am very good at certain games.

Give me work and I will work.

Give me a spreadsheet and I will eventually attempt to conquer Western civilization with it.

Give me a screenplay problem and I can disappear into it for ten hours.

But ask me to spend thirty minutes stretching, sit still for ten minutes, read a novel without checking my phone, go lift something heavy or stop working while there is still work available?

Apparently we have located the radical material.

Four weeks from now I'm going to Austin.

When I started this, there was probably some version in my head where I'd arrive there noticeably transformed.

Leaner.

Stronger.

Better clothes.

Better posture.

Calm.

Read a bunch of books.

New man walks into the Austin Film Festival.

Cue needle drop.

That's not going to happen in four weeks.

At least not the movie version.

Good.

Fuck the movie version.

I don't need to arrive in Austin having completed the Revamp.

I need to arrive having spent four weeks doing the parts of it I have mostly avoided.

That means Quarter Two cannot look like Quarter One with even more outreach.

I've proven I can send the email.

I've proven I can keep a career machine moving.

It does not need another thousand contacts in the next four weeks just because one thousand made me feel productive.

The machine can stay on.

It just doesn't get the whole electrical grid anymore.

Some of that power goes somewhere else.

Gym.

Book.

Stretch.

Sit down.

Shut up for ten minutes.

Breathe.

Go outside.

Take care of my body before it becomes another thing I have researched extensively and never actually used.

This isn't catching up.

That's important.

I am not going to do eight weeks of exercise in four.

I'm not going to read twice as much because I failed to read before.

I'm not making up meditation sessions like God is keeping attendance.

Quarter One is over.

The grade is already in the book.

Reallocation isn't the same thing as a restart.

If one department spent its entire annual budget in September, you don't burn down the company.

You stop giving that department all the fucking money.

That's Quarter Two.

The career keeps moving.

I keep writing.

I follow the live conversations.

I make the good asks.

But I stop behaving as though every hour not spent advancing the career is an hour stolen from it.

Because that's the fear underneath this.

If I stop for an hour, I lose an hour of writing.

If I go to the gym, I lose pages.

If I read, I lose outreach.

If I meditate, there are probably twelve managers somewhere signing younger writers while I sit on the floor like an asshole concentrating on my nose.

You can live that way.

I have.

The problem is the math never ends.

There is always one more page.

One more email.

One more person.

One more opportunity I might miss if I go do something as reckless as having a life.

Eventually the work you're afraid of running out of time to do takes all the time you were supposedly trying to save for living.

There's the scam.

I can't fix Quarter One.

I don't want to.

I want it sitting there exactly as it happened.

Career screaming forward.

Everything else coughing behind it.

That is useful information.

The next four weeks don't need redemption.

They need different evidence.

I don't need another plan that proves I understand what to do.

I understand.

Go lift.

Open the book.

Stretch.

Breathe.

Sit still.

Then tomorrow, do some of it again.

Austin is four weeks away.

Twenty-eight days.

I'm not restarting.

I'm already late.

Good.

Tuesday follows Monday.