Encouraged to do impossible and/or evil things

Yesterday my boss asked me to call up an assistant in New York (that I almost never speak with) to get a number to reach a writer. I called, was pleasant and nice, and was told that this writer doesn't have an office or an assistant. Like many in the entertainment industry today, this writer didn't need those things. He was able to work from home off of his personal email and cell phone until a production office would get set up. The only possible number to reach this person on was the cell phone, which this assistant wasn't even sure she had.

In the event somebody does have a cell phone number, they REALLY aren't supposed to give that kind of thing out without prior permission. This is the kind of thing assistants get fired for easily.

So when this assistant told me that she didn't have a number she could release, I was fine with that. I thanked her for her time, and hung up.

This morning I was telling my boss that this writer was only working off a cell, and would be difficult to get in touch with. He lectures me that I need to get "better at sweet talking people to give me things."

This isn't a matter of negotiations. This is an assistant across the country that I've never met before, and never even spoken with before. She has no personal connection to me, and I have no leverage over her. I have nothing that she wants. She has nothing to gain from giving me this information, no matter how charming I am. And if she did give it to me, she could be fired.

So I'm being encouraged to do something that is either impossible or evil. Either there's no way she'll give me the number without permission no matter what I say, or I somehow come up with some way to pressure her into risking her job.

It's especially hypocritical when I'm told very often not to even give the reason we're calling someone over the phone. If I'm expected to never give out information of any kind, why should everyone I speak with give me all kinds of confidential information? No amount of flirting skills over the phone could do that.

Holidays: Spend them together or apart?

I just bought my tickets to go back to Boston for Thanksgiving, but for a while there I was a bit worried that they'd be too expensive, and I wouldn't be able to do it (Thanks Virgin America, you're awesome). When I thought I might not go back, I had an offer from Writress's family to spend Thanksgiving with them.

They understood why I declined, but they still like me. It did call into question what holiday protocol will be in years to come.

Right now, I think that Writress and I are going to our respective families for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and spending New Year's Eve together in LA. But pretty soon we're gonna be at that point where it might be weird spending holidays apart. We're going to have to figure out how to decide whose home to go to.

I figure we'll eventually go one of a few different ways:

1) We alternate Thanksgiving and Christmas each family every year. One side gets more presents and days off, but if we switch every year it stays fair.

2) We spend Christmas with my family since it's harder to travel to the East Coast, and Thanksgiving with her family in Colorado. There would also be an understanding that there would be at least one additional trip to Colorado (perhaps for 4th of July again) since it's just a two hour flight with only a one hour time change, so long weekends are easy to travel.

3) We start selling pilots, get rich, and host both holidays at our awesome house in California. Or our schedule is flexible enough and we have enough money to travel back and forth all over the place during each holiday season.

If only everyone lived in the same city, or at least the same time zone, things would be easier. But for now, we're sticking with the same system we've been using since college. Holiday comes up, and we go home.

P.S. I've changed my blogger name from "he who rants" to "finds life hilarious." I think that since I'm so happy at home I have less reason to rant on here. I'd rather keep things positive.

Calendar stress

It's that time of year again where looking at my calendar becomes stressful.

I've started writing actual pages of my fantasy pilot, and I'm on track to get it done on time, but it's tough when other aspects of my life like setting drinks with other assistants for work start to invade into my writing time.

Suddenly that "Christmas is approaching" feeling starts to creep in, and I become acutely aware of just how many nights I have between now and then, especially as I see them fill up.

The things I want to do out of work really would be enough to occupy someone as a full time job. At least I know I'm not being idle.

Haven't posted in a month

My boss suddenly started to get weird and snoop around at browsing histories in the office, so I haven't been able to post here as often (not that it ever kept me from getting work done before).

Here's what's new:

I met that mentor. He was a nice guy. Finally had lunch with him the other day and he really liked my writing. He had some helpful notes, but said that I was clearly a good writer and should be working in a room somewhere. I agreed. Hopefully he knows some agents that would be willing to sign on young writing talent.

I've written a twenty page outline for my fantasy pilot. It's coming along really well. It really feels with each revision and new idea that I'm not making something up, it's like I'm an archeologist uncovering something that's been buried in the desert. It all exists, I just won't see it all until I've finished digging and brushing things off.

Writress is loving her new job. It sounds like they're cool people, and I'd love to meet them too. Hopefully the show won't get canceled. With her working through writers' rooms being her charming self and me making connections through mentors, it wouldn't be inconceivable that eventually we could get work as a writing team together.

Halloween is this weekend, but some people started having parties last weekend. Our costume idea was a hit, so we're going to use it again. It involved me putting a temporary tattoo of a pentagram made of skulls on my neck. For some reason, a lot of people thought it was real. This is hilarious, because no way in hell could I pull that kind of thing off in real life.

Meeting a mentor tonight

My college alumni group is starting up a new mentorship program where they match established Hollywood people with those who are just starting out their careers. I was hoping to get matched with a writer, but the best they could do was a former development exec from a cable network. While it's not perfect, maybe he can help point me in the right direction for what to do when I have some finished work ready to send out.

The first meeting is tonight. They're having a meet and greet for all the mentors and mentees.

Writress is feeling better, and is now mostly concerned with needing work. Her show got its pickup for the new season, but she hasn't heard when it's starting. In the meantime I was able to find a posting for her about a similar job on a show we really like, staffed by some of our favorite writers. She has an interview with the showrunner on Monday, so fingers crossed on multiple fronts.

We're having a party this weekend to celebrate her birthday and our new apartment. It's nothing crazy, as a big party wouldn't fit in our place, but it should be fun.

It's getting to be busy enough now that I wish there was more time in the day. I have my day job, which is enough to leave me wanting to relax at the end of the day even if it wasn't too stressful. My job is also encouraging me to set more drinks meetings with other assistants. I've got two writing groups that need me to make deadlines and provide notes to other writers. New shows are starting again, and I need to stay current. There are older shows that I want to watch and study, video games I want to play, and friends I want to see. Basically, there's more than enough to keep me busy even if I didn't have a day job, and a lot of the time I just want to sleep at the end of the day.

I think the best thing for me would be to try to do one thing at a time and keep a schedule, and hopefully sooner rather than later I'll be staffed on a show in which the showrunner is the type that doesn't like keeping writers there after 6. At which point I'll find a new life goal to strive for, namely BEING a showrunner who doesn't need to keep writers past 6.

Have a new logline, and making up rules of the world

My new writing module through my alumni network has started up again. I'll be writing a new pilot rather than spending months revisiting something I wrote already.

The seeds of the idea are still growing in my mind, but so far it all seems to fit. I went over it with my other group on Sunday, and settled on the logline. No, I will not be posting it here.

It's in the fantasy genre. There is the worry that people will be prematurely dismissive about this kind of script, but I decided I don't care about that. If I write this well and make it interesting for the audience they won't care as much what genre it is. My last one hour pilot was about video gamers, and people who didn't play games still read and enjoyed that script.

These kinds of worlds get my imagination going, and you can have high stakes, and define the rules of your world. Rather than spending months researching something that already exists and trying to fit a script around that, I'm making up rules of a world as I go and based on my needs. As long as I'm consistent, I don't think that's cheating. What I hate more is when somebody knowingly changes facts about a real life situation in order to make it work for their story.

Here's an example from a show I love: The West Wing. I watched that show on DVD in college, and loved it. I listened to all the commentaries, I studied it. I'm rewatching it with Writress, and while it's still an amazing show, I think more like a writer now than I did when I was 21. [SPOIELR ALERT] In the third season finale we see a Secret Service agent stop an armed robbery, but then get shot by another gunman. The first time I saw it I was caught up in the story and the emotions of the characters. This time I knew it was coming, and I realized how ridiculous it was. This wasn't a second gunman hiding with a sniper rifle in the rafters. This was just some hoodlum standing behind an aisle in a corner grocery store. The only reason the Secret Service Agent dies is that after subduing the first gunman, he holsters his gun and makes a joke with the clerk without checking the rest of the scene. He doesn't ask if there was more than one guy. He just blindly stumbles around this crime scene with no regard for any possible threats.

I could maybe see a rookie cop make that mistake. But this was a Secret Service agent. He went through the Army, was a cop, and finally became one of the President's security detail. These guys are paid to be paranoid and check out any possible threat wherever they are, by instinct. There's no way that kind of guy would let some dumb kid get the jump on him like that.

That was a situation in which the logic of the world was broken for the sake of the plot, and so Aaron Sorkin could once more make his favorite point about how guns are evil, even for people like cops who are trained to use them.

Breaks from logic cheapen a world, and make it less real. You lose the illusion. For me the best stories are ones where you can be left believing in the back of your mind that somewhere, somehow, sometime, this could be real. Jerking your story and the rules of the world around just to make things easier for yourself is like breaking the laws of physics. It makes things just that much more impossible, and less real.

So while I create my own fantasy kingdom, I won't have to spend hours looking up the actual laws and traditions concerning coronations in 14th century Britain. I can make those up on my own. But what I do make up has to seem logical and plausible enough that for an hour a week viewers can curl of on their couch and pretend that this place of adventure is real.

Writress is still feeling sick

While we were visiting my family on Cape Cod (which could not have gone better by the way, they all loved her) Writress started getting a headache, and it started feeling like I was sleeping with a space heater. We tried to take it easy, relax, and get a lot of fluids into her, but when we got back to LA she was still feeling feverish and lousy. She went to see a doctor on Monday who said she had bronchitis and gave her a prescription.

She's been trying to take it easy all week, but it was still pretty busy because her sister came on a last minute visit to see a show at the Hollywood Bowl, and her Dad was also in town for a couple days.

One of the ways I can tell my family likes her is this. Not only have they been asking about how she's doing when I call home, this morning while I was at work I got a text from Writress reading: "Your mom just called to see how I was feeling : )". I guess my dad and sister had informed my mom that she was still sick, and she got all maternal and called our apartment to check up on her. They really see her as part of the family now.

And they should. I think they can tell how serious I am about her. It's been a bit quiet at work this week and I've even started browsing around on a website called theplunge.com which is a guy's answer to what they call "wedding porn" like TheKnot. Honestly, it's really just down to me figuring out the engagement ring stuff and figuring out when to propose. This girl has been unable to do anything all week but lay there feverish, and I still want to spend all my free time with her.

Right now her plan for the weekend is to fly out tomorrow morning to see her parents and grandparents for a couple days, but I'm trying to convince her to stay put if she still doesn't feel well. Here's hoping we get to just relax together for a couple days. Otherwise it'll be my first two days alone in the apartment, which will be weird.