Redshirts (30 page)

The assistant’s response:

Unfortunately XXXXX XXXXX doesn’t have any availability at this time. Thanks for your interest and good luck on your project.

Translation: Your crazy would be fine if it was for
People
magazine, or maybe even
Us,
but if it’s freelance crazy, we don’t want anything to do with you.

Sigh. There was a time when freelance crazy was respected in this town! I think it was the early 80s. David Lee Roth was hanging out at the Whisky then. Or so I have heard. I was, like,
six
at the time.

One down, five to go.…

AW

*   *   *

New response. This is kind of awesome, actually.

To: ANON-A-WRITER

From: XXXXX X XXXX, Esq., partner, XXXX, XXXXX, XXX and XXXXX

Dear Mr. Writer:

Your e-mail query to XXXXX XXXXXX was forwarded to us by his assistant, as is every letter for which they feel there is some concern about. Mr. XXXXXX values his privacy considerably and was greatly unsettled by your e-mail, both for its content and because it arrived in an unsolicited manner at a private e-mail.

At this time our client has decided not to escalate the matter by asking the XXXXXXX Police Department to investigate you and your e-mail. However, we request that you do not ever again attempt to contact our client in any way. If you attempt to do so, we will forward all correspondence both to the XXXXXXX Police Department and to the FBI and file for a restraining order against you. I do not need to tell you that such a request would instantly become news, severely impacting your career as a staff writer on XXXXXXXXXX.

We trust that this is the last we will hear from you.

Yours,

XXXXX X XXXX, Esq., partner, XXXX, XXXXX, XXX and XXXXX

Whoa.

Just for the record, the e-mail I sent did
not
begin: “Dear XXXXX, as I happened to be standing over your bed last night,
watching you sleep
…” It really didn’t. I
swear
.

Either this person gets more crazy e-mails than usual from people who dress up as their cat and then stand outside their house, or this person got spooked by this e-mail for an entirely other reason. Hmmmm.

Is it worth getting the FBI involved to find out?

No. No, it is not.

Not
yet,
anyway. Still curious.

And now I’m fighting off an urge to dress up as this person’s cat and stand outside their house. But it’s early yet, and it’s a weeknight. Maybe after a few more gin rickeys.

AW

*   *   *

From the comments:

I’m not entirely convinced you’ve seen your characters come alive, but as someone who suffers from writer’s block all the time, it’s amazing to me that you can joke about your situation as much as you do on this site, especially when your actual job is on the line. If I were you, I would be wetting my pants right about now.

Oh, trust me. I am. I so very
am
. My local Pavilions is entirely out of Depends right about now. I shop for them at night, so my neighbors won’t see me. And when I’m done with them I put them in my next door neighbor’s trash can so they can’t be traced back to me. I’m not proud. Or dry.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, Internet: Part of the reason I’m writing this blog right now is in fact to keep from shitting myself in abject fear. The last time I went a week without writing something creative was when I was in college and I spent six days in the hospital for a truly epic case of food poisoning. (Dorm food. Not always the freshest. I wasn’t the only one. For the rest of the year my dorm was known as the Puke Palace. I digress.) And even then, when I thought I was going to retch my lower intestine right out past my tongue, I was plotting stories and trying out dialogue in my head. Right now, I try plotting a story or thinking about dialogue for a script and a big wall comes down in my brain. I. Just. Cannot. Write.

This has never happened to me before. I am absolutely terrified that
this is it,
that the creative tank is all out of gas and that from here on out there’s nothing for me but residuals and occasional teaching gigs at the Learning Annex. I mean, fuck, kill me now. It terrifies me so much that there’s only two things I can think to do at the moment:

1. Make a special cocktail of antifreeze and OxyContin and then take a long, luxurious bath with my toaster.

2. Write on this blog like it’s a methadone treatment.

One of these options doesn’t have me found as a bloated corpse a week later. Guess which one.

As for the joking, well, look. When I was twelve, my appendix burst, and as they were wheeling my ass into the operating room, I asked the doctor, “How will this affect my piano playing?” and he said, “Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to play the piano,” and I said, “Wow! I wasn’t able to before!”

And then they gassed me.

My point is that even when I was about to die of imminent peritonitis I was still going for the joke. Failing, but going for it. (Actually, as my father said in the recovery room, “All the jokes in the world you could have made at that moment, and that’s the one you go for. You are no son of mine.” Dad took his jokes seriously.)

Shorter version of all of the above: If I actually wrote in a way that indicated how bowel-voidingly scared I am at the moment, you would have all fled by now. And I probably would have gone to play in traffic. It’s better to joke, I think.

Don’t you?

AW

*   *   *

Hey, now we’re getting somewhere. The following e-mail from the next person on my list:

Dear Anon-a-Writer:

Your e-mail intrigues me on several levels. In fact, there is some crossover between what happens in my books and what happens in my real life. Your canny ambiguity in asking the question suggests to me you might have some of that same crossover.

As it happens, I’ll be coming to LA tomorrow to meet with my film agent about a project we’re pitching at XXXXXXXXX Studios. After I’m done with the industry glad-handing, I’d be happy to meet and chat. I’m staying at XXX XXXX XXXXXXX; let’s meet in the bar there about 5, if you have the time.

Yours,

XXXXXX XXXXXX

So
that
sounds wildly promising. Now all I have to do is keep myself from
exploding with anxiety
for the next 24 hours or so. Fortunately I have meetings all day tomorrow. And yes, I said
fortunately
—the more meetings I have to sit in at work, the less anyone asks about the scripts I’m supposed to be working on. This is getting harder to keep up. I did suggest to one of the other staff writers that he and I collaborate on a script, and that he bang out the story outline and maybe the first draft. I can make him do the first draft because I’m senior. I can do it without guilt because he owes me money. I question my moral grounding. But at the moment, not as much as I would otherwise.

Hopefully the writer I’m meeting tomorrow will have something useful for me. Meetings and taking advantage of underlings only goes so far.

AW

*   *   *

Okay. I’ve met with the other writer. She’s Denise Hogan. And in order to describe our “conversation,” I’m going to use a format I’m used to.

INT. COFFEE SHOP — CORNER TABLE — DAY

Two people are sitting at the table, coffees in hand, the remains of muffins on the table. They are ANON-A-WRITER and DENISE HOGAN. They have been talking for an hour as ANON-A-WRITER has described his crisis to DENISE in detail.

DENISE

That’s really a very interesting situation you’ve gotten yourself into.

ANON-A-WRITER

“Interesting” isn’t the word I would use for it. “Magnificently screwed” is the phrase I would use.

DENISE

Yes, that would work, too.

AW

But this has happened to you too, right?

When you write the characters in your novels, they are always arguing with you and ignoring how you want the plot to go and running off and doing their own thing. It’s your trademark. You write it like it actually happens.

DENISE

(gently)

Well, I think we need to have some definition of terms on this.

AW

(draws back)

Definition of terms? That sounds like code for “No, it doesn’t actually happen to me that way, you crazy crazy person.”

DENISE

(beat)

AW, may I be honest with you?

AW

Considering what I just splashed out to you over the last hour? Yes, would you, please.

DENISE

I’m here because I read your blog.

AW

I don’t have a blog.

DENISE

You don’t have one under your actual name. You have one as Anon-a-Writer.

AW

(beat)

Oh. Oh,
shit
.

DENISE

(holds up hands)

Relax, I’m not here to out you.

AW

Fuck!

(gets up, thinks about leaving, shuffles back and forth for a moment, sits back down)

How did you find it?

DENISE

How anyone with an ego finds anything on the Internet. I have a Google alert tied to my name.

AW

(runs hands through hair)

Fucking
Google,
man.

DENISE

I clicked through to see if it was some sort of feature piece on writers who break the fourth wall and then I saw what your blog was really about, and I put it into my RSS feed. I knew you were going to contact me before you sent your e-mail.

AW

You’re not actually in town to see your film agent.

DENISE

Well, no. I had lunch with him today, and we
did
talk about that Paramount thing. But I called him after I got your e-mail and told him I was going to be in town. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him why else I was here.

AW

So your characters aren’t actually alive and talking to you.

DENISE

Other than the usual thing writers mean about making their characters come alive, no.

AW

Swell.

(stands up again)

Thank you for wasting a large portion of my day. Nice to meet you.

DENISE

But you and I have something in common.

AW

Besides the wasted afternoon?

DENISE

(crossly)

Look, I didn’t come here to get a close-up look at a freak show. I already have my first husband for that. I came here because I think I understand your situation better than you think. I had writer’s block too. A bad one.

AW

How bad?

DENISE

More than a year. Bad enough for you?

AW

Maybe.

DENISE

I think I can help you with yours. Because whether I believe you or not about your characters being actually real, I think my own writer’s block situation is close to what yours is now.

AW

If you don’t believe what I’m saying, I don’t see how your situation could be like mine.

DENISE

Because we both had characters we’re scared to do anything with.

AW

(sits back down, warily)

Go on.

DENISE

For whatever reason, you have characters you’re scared of killing or hurting, and it’s blocking you. For me, I had characters who I couldn’t make do anything critical. I would push them to a crisis point in my stories, but when it came time for them to pull the trigger—to do something significant—I could never get them to do it. I’d devise all these ways to get them out of the holes I spent chapters putting them into. The way I was doing wasn’t good. Finally I froze up completely. I just couldn’t write.

AW

But that’s about
you
—

DENISE

(holds up hand)

Wait, I’m not done. Finally, one day as I was sitting in front of my laptop, doing nothing with my characters, I typed one of them turning to me as the writer and saying, “Would you just fucking make up your mind already? No? Fine. I’ll do it, then.” And then he did something I didn’t expect—that I wasn’t even wanting him to do—and when he did it, it was like a huge flood of possibilities broke through the dam of my writer’s block. My character did what I was afraid of him doing.