It would seem I have quite the uptick in subscribers. Welcome! I’m thrilled to have you! Please excuse the mess. If I knew I’d be having company I would have cleaned …

Seriously, though, thank you to all who have subscribed in the last couple days. I like having this teeny tiny little slice of the internet all to myself (take that, Elon Musk!!), and excited to share my brain ramblings with you here.

I spent the better part of my day today applying to a television writing program with the Sundance Film Festival. It was not your typical application process, where you submit your script and logline, pay your $50 application fee and then you’re done. For this application, I had to answer a series of essay questions, which is a type of writing that I have not engaged in with any regularity for <checks watch> about a hundred and seventy-five years.

But write those essays I did. And as it turns out, it was a fantastic way of clarifying some ideas for my long-suffering TV pilot “Calamity Jen” that I feel will benefit not only that piece, but any and all of my future TV writing projects.

Now, the odds that I will actually get into this program at Sundance are just slightly better than my odds of winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. But, you know, nothing ventured, nothing blah, blah, blah.

Still, I hate to think that any form of writing I engage in will go to waste. And so, for your reading enjoyment, I present one of those said essays. The questions posed to me for this particular essay were:

“What is your personal connection to the material? Why are you the best person to tell this story? Why tell this story now?”

For context, the logline for “Calamity Jen” is: After a series of climate-related disasters devastate the country, a once promising young actress attempts to rebuild her life by joining an inept theater troupe as they navigate a lawless, post-apocalyptic America.

Here’s what I came up with, in exactly the 250 words I was allotted …

***

There’s only one place I’ve ever felt I truly fit in — with my community of theater misfits.

Maybe because of this, I’ve always loved the vicarious thrill of dystopian fiction. My favorite books are “The Stand,” “The Road” and “Station Eleven.” I was obsessed with “The Walking Dead.” “The Last of Us” now promises to surpass that.

And that episode of “The Twilight Zone,” where the world is annihilated and Burgess Meredith’s sad little bookworm finally gets the chance to read all the books he wants? Those crushed glasses will haunt me until I die.

But consuming all those stories left me with a nagging hypothetical: if society collapsed, what would I DO?

And it may not be hypothetical! The planet is dying! We’ve endured a global pandemic, and experts think it may not be the last! America, that shining city on a hill, is so fractured that democratic self-rule may become a thing of the past!

So, yeah. That question of what I would do in the Apocalypse has nagged at me.

But if the pandemic taught me anything, it’s that theater people like myself will keep finding ways to put on shows, even if it’s over Zoom.

And that may not be a bad thing! Because when the world is at its lowest, that’s when we need art the most. I think stories like “Calamity Jen” need to be told. And if we can have a few laughs along the way, then so much the better.

Somewhere in my late-20s, I decided to become a self-styled literary snob. The science fiction and fantasy books of my youth were to be cast aside and purged from my memory. Horror? No time for it. Mysteries? Child’s play. Romance? Oh, please. I would not sully my mind with such tripe.

I did read some great books in those days—books that have stayed with me over the years: Remembrance of Things Past; One Hundred Years of Solitude; For Whom the Bell Tolls; Things Fall Apart. More modern works were okay, too, as long as they were winners of esteemed prizes, or works by daring new authors, or novels that pushed the boundaries of blah, blah, blah. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Infinite Jest. (Okay, I’m lying about reading that last one. But it’s the kind of thing I would have read.)

There are those who would look at that list and say, “Well, yes. Rather resembles my own library and those are books that should be read, kind sir, so what’s the issue?”

The issue, at least for me, is that when I narrowed my scope of novels to only serious literary fiction, reading began to feel like homework. Much of the joy was sucked away from what was supposed to be a relaxing, leisure time activity. I had set a boundary that didn’t need to be set and clung to it as if some vengeful, literary deity might strike me down if I cozied up with a Particia Cornwell yarn.

That fever was broken several years ago when my brother got me a science fiction book for Christmas. It was written by an author whose online work I had long admired, but whose books—(gasp! Genre fiction!)—I had eschewed. Feeling as though I were committing a cardinal sin, I cracked it open … and was astonished to find that I loved it. It was fun. It was entertaining. It was, dare I say, a joy to read. It felt like a whole new world had been opened up to me. I could read a book that was not considered to be a “weighty tome,” and the consequences would be … nothing. My life would not be adversely affected in any way. All I would reap was a few hours of enjoyment.

When the pandemic shut everything down, my reading kicked into hyperdrive, and I decided to dip my toes into a series about which I had long been curious, but still a little too snobbish to try on for size.

That series was Jack Reacher.

Now let me start out by saying that, to this day, I don’t know if these books are any good. Stephen King swears by them, and they have a massive following. They’ve inspired two Tom Cruise-helmed movies—one okay, one not so much—and a pretty faithful TV adaptation. But does any of that mean they’re good? Again, I don’t know. What I do know is that I adore them. Over the course of a year and a half, I churned through all twenty-four of Lee Child’s Reacher novels. (The books “co-written” by his son, still coming out? I’m gonna pass.) They helped steer me through the dark days of the pandemic, and I will always be thankful that I had Jack Reacher to help me through that time.

And so I thought it might be useful to pinpoint exactly what it is I find so compelling about these books. What is it that has kept me—and millions of others—coming back to these books again and again?

No need to bury the lead here: it’s the title character. When all is said and done, I’m not reading Lee Child novels—I’m reading Jack Reacher novels.

For a character to keep readers coming back time after time, they have to have a hook. And Reacher (as even his mother called him!) has many. He’s big (6’ 5”, 250). He’s tough (never lost a street fight). He has an unshakeable moral code. But for all his tough guy antics, he doesn’t stand in judgment of others. As long as you don’t break his number one rule (“Don’t mess with me.”), you’ll probably be fine.

He’s also refreshingly uncomplicated. In a time when pop culture is still influenced by the rise of conflicted anti-heroes like Tony Soprano and Walter White, Reacher’s life is not one of inner-turmoil. He’s largely at peace. Just be sure to let the man enjoy his cup of coffee.

All of these traits, particularly when taken together, would be enough to provide the reader with the necessary “hook.” But the real draw of Reacher is the fantasy of freedom.

After a lifetime spent in the military—a childhood abroad with a Marine Corps father, seventeen years as an Army cop—Reacher musters out, and for the first time in his life there is no one to tell him what to do, where to go, what to wear, when to eat. It’s liberating, but also confusing. When he inherits a house in book #3 and attempts to settle down with an old flame, the death by a thousand cuts of paying bills, doing housework and living an ordinary life proves to be too much for him. By the end of book #4, he’s back on the road, his only possessions a toothbrush, his passport and some cash.

How many times have we all wished we could do the same? When the mundanity of life and the pressures of our careers and the responsibilities to our families feel overwhelming, who hasn’t fantasized about walking away from it all and roaming free, unshackled from our ties and commitments?

Reacher is a samurai. He’s Caine from “Kung Fu.” He’s Lao Tzu with a penchant for whooping ass.

He’s also Thoreau, breaking away from society and stripping life down to its essential parts. Why carry a suitcase when you can wear the same clothes for a week, buy new ones at a Salvation Army and trash the old ones? Simplify, simplify, simplify! You can feel the influence of the Transcendentalists all over the Reacher books.

Reacher is the engine that keeps these books moving along. As he makes his way around a country he barely knows, experiencing the “every day” with an outsider’s fascination, he comes across dangerous situations and goes toe to toe with pure evil. Are these plotlines always believable? Oh, God no. An early twist in book #1 (which drives the majority of the story) is so far-fetched I almost abandoned the series right there. And are we really to believe he stumbles into these harrowing adventures in every town he visits? I’ve traveled this country pretty extensively and I’ve never been kidnapped after unknowingly holding the door for an FBI agent, or falsely arrested because I fit the description of a murder suspect, or hitched a ride with some folks only to find that one of them is being held prisoner.

But as readers, we don’t care. We want him to be put into ludicrous situations. We want to go along on the journey as he outthinks, outpunches and outromances the bad guys. We want to believe that there is someone out there who’s capable of facing down injustice. We want to spend a few hours pretending that person could be us.

Jack Reacher will never be considered serious literary fiction, nor does it wish to be. More importantly, neither do the readers. We want the fantasy. We want to believe that a part of us is Jack Reacher. We want to believe there’s a version of our lives where the everyday stressors can’t reach us. How could they? We’ve left all that behind. We’re on the open road. Like Reacher, we have no fixed address.

Remember, like, a year and a half ago? When I came to L.A. and started writing about it? Giving updates on things I was working on? And then I stopped? Well, let’s get caught up …

After our 2 months in L.A. were up, my family returned to Knoxville where life went back to whatever version of normal exists in the age of Covid. I took a job as the Drama Director at the Knoxville Jewish Day School while continuing to teach and direct at Knoxville Children’s Theatre. (Pro tip: you shouldn’t try to direct two shows simultaneously, especially when kids are involved … and one of those shows has a cast of 50. It won’t go well.) The missus continued with her work, the child went back to school. But the seed of L.A. had been planted and the questions lingered. Could we live there? Could we give up our quiet Knoxville life? Could we be “L.A. People?”

I won’t bother going into all of the nitty let alone the gritty regarding our decision making. Suffice it to say that chance and choice conspired to where a move became more necessity than luxury. And so …

We’re in L.A.! For good! Probably!

And how is it going? It’s … interesting. We’ve been here seven months, and there is much that is good (we have friends here!) and much that is strange (it’s a drought no now it’s flooding!) and much that is Idunnoyourguessisasgoodasmine. We’re renting an apartment for this first year while crossing our fingers that the housing market will regain a modicum of sanity when our lease is up. I know things will work out in that department, but it’s hard to feel settled when half your stuff is still in boxes and Zillow is stubbornly refusing to be anything more than a stress-inducing doomscroll.

But Geoff! You wanted to write for television, and now you’re in the place where they make television! Surely you’ve been aggressively pursuing opportunities!

Oh, of course! Of course I have. Yeah, yeah I … no. No I have not. Not really. At least not yet.

Step one was to find employment. With some teaching experience under my belt, I thought that might be a lock, but I wasn’t able to land a position anywhere. I’ve been steadily booking work as an audiobook narrator, which has been great and feels like it could be lucrative in the long term. As a newbie, though, I’m currently at the bottom of that particular pay scale. I continue to audition for books and record on the regular, but I’m getting the sinking feeling that employment involving a name tag and/or apron is in my near future.

So, yes, I still want to write and pursue those opportunities and I will. I have gone back and touched up some old pilots and I’m putting them out into the world, but a hard push may still be a ways away. I’ll keep you posted.

At any rate … I’m in L.A.! I live here! It feels like there’s opportunity! We shall see where it goes …

So I experienced my first (virtual) film festival last week. If you want to know how I felt about it, please refer to the title of this post.

The timing of said festival played a large part in this somewhat impulsive trip to L.A. It was not, as I previously wrote about, the only reason we came out here, nor was it even the main reason. But it was a major part of the calculus, and now that it’s over, I don’t mind confessing to a certain amount of disappointment.

The first disappointment was the “virtual” part. At the time that we were planning this trip, it was still undecided whether the festival would be in-person, virtual or some combination of the two. By the time that our flights and accommodations were booked, it had already been announced that the festival would be all virtual. That seemed like not great news, but workable. My feeling was that if I could make a good connection virtually, I could at least follow it up with, “Well, as it happens, I’m actually in L.A. until next month. I’d love to get together so we could …”

Alas, those connections were not to be made, which was the main disappointment here. (My script also did not win in its category, but that was a much smaller disappointment — my goal was networking, not having another laurel to post on my social media feed.) I took advantage of every opportunity I could to talk to folks, including speed networking and sitting down at virtual “tables,” but mostly I was just chatting with other writers and content creators who are in the same boat as I am. These conversations weren’t bad, mind you; some were downright pleasant. And, yes, I know, I know. You never know who you’re gonna meet or where a conversation might lead or blah, blah, blah. But the fact is, I know plenty of artists. I don’t need to expand that part of my Rolodex. It’s industry people I need to meet.

What was I expecting from this festival? Realistically, not much. After 18 years in the New York theater scene, I’ve come to accept that most events being peddled as “great opportunities” turn out to be much ado about nothing. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t hopeful that some concrete connections might have been made. It doesn’t mean I can’t feel disappointed that — for me — the event was a bit of a bust.

So what now? Well, the good news is that this experience hasn’t sent me backward — it just didn’t propel me forward. So I’m no worse off now than I was before. (And a trip to the beach this past weekend has already done much to restore my good humor.) I have a few strategies for making connections that I’ll continue to pursue while I’m here, and they’ll either pay off or they won’t. If the former, great! If the latter … well, either way I’m heading back to Knoxville in a few weeks with summer classes to teach, a musical to direct and nothing to prevent me from continuing to write and continuing to put myself — and my work — out into the universe. There are worse things.

After my contest win for “Calamity Jen” earlier this year, I was put in touch with a producer to discuss possible next steps for both the show and my career. One of the first questions he asked was what other pilots I’d written. The answer was none. What pilots was I working on? Uh … I had an idea for one?

I’ve got no shortage of plays I can show off, including one that’s been published and one that was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, but when it comes to TV I’m a bit of a tabula rasa. This can have some benefits, as a lack of history means there’s no bad press weighing me down — kind of like a freshman Senator with no voting record to criticize (yet). But it can also be a potential red flag to industry-types who might wonder — fairly — if my award-winning script is just so much beginner’s luck. It’s like the thing they say about writing a novel: Most people have one good book in them; hardly anybody has two.

So my first task was to come up with some more show ideas and write two more pilots to prove I have the chops. Sure. No problem. First and last scripts of a series are the easy ones, right?

But come up with them I did. The first was “Eleison,” a show about a burned out, alcoholic priest in his early-50s who’s being coerced by the local bishop into performing the worst job in the archdiocese — being installed as the pastor of under-performing parishes with the sole intent of closing those places down. The script pulled heavily from the twelve years I spent working for the Catholic Church, and, to be honest, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about it. I’ve written extensively about the church for the theater and in a handful of pieces for TheHumanist.com, so it’s pretty well-worn territory for me. But I figured it was the kind of thing I could bang out quickly without having to do any major research on the topic. So I banged.

I was much more excited about the second show. It was an idea I had been kicking around for a couple of years; I’d researched it thoroughly and had even developed most of the major characters and themes. It was about a female scientist who joins a secretive organization known as The Jasons — a real-life group of scientists who meet every summer as advisers to the Department of Defense. I’d originally conceived the show as a straight-ahead, network procedural, but after talking it over with my new producer friend, he advised me that it’s best for a beginning writer to find one genre and stick with it. “Calamity Jen” and “Eleison” were both dark-ish comedies (or dramedies) intended for streaming or cable, so it stood to reason that “The Jasons” should follow suit. So I re-imagined it for the streaming space with a more irreverent point of view and set to writing it.

And it turned out … not great. As it happens, changing the entire tenor of a show ain’t so easy, and the pilot felt very much like a square peg in a round hole. This left me with two pilots that I felt less-than-enthusiastic about, and the sinking suspicion that maybe I really was a one-script wonder.

Then I took another look at “Eleison” and began to think that maybe I hadn’t given it a fair shot. The bones were there, I just needed to flesh it out a bit more.

And, most importantly, I needed an ending.

I played around with about a half-dozen different endings, writing long stretches of dialogue that would all wind up in the virtual trashcan by end of day. The most frustrating part was that I knew where I wanted the episode to go — our priest chooses to defy the archdiocese and save the parish he’s been assigned to rather than destroy it — but I didn’t know how to get there. I needed a catalyst, and I didn’t know where to find it.

I think every writer faces problems like these (certainly every writer I’ve whined to about this script over the past few weeks has been able to empathize). I’ve faced similar issues in the past, and I think I’ve been able to figure out a solution every time. (Was it always the best solution? Who can say? At the very least, the solutions have been serviceable. Maybe that’s enough.) How I’ve come up with those solutions tends to vary. Sometimes the eureka moment happens during a long, hot shower. Sometimes it happens on a run. Sometimes it’s talking it out with another writer. There doesn’t seem to be a one-size-fits-all method for me, which can be the cause of some serious anxiety. The shower thing worked the last time! Why not now?!?!

For this script, talking it out seems to have been what I needed. As of this writing, I have an ending that I … think works? I may need to go back through the script and beef up a couple sections to make it look like “this was what I intended all along,” but I’m, like, 87% sure this ending closes the loop. At the very least, I’m hoping the script is strong enough to demonstrate to all those industry-types that I have a command of the craft and the ability to come up with more than one good idea.

As for the other show? “The Jasons?” Yeah, I don’t know if that’s salvageable. Oh, well. Time to get cracking on that spec script for “Ted Lasso!”

I spent a good chunk of my late-twenties, early-thirties learning to cook, which strikes me as a bit of an odd thing to say. Learn to cook? What’s there to learn? Find a recipe, buy ingredients, follow the directions. Simple.

But you do need to learn, of course. Cooking isn’t an exact science, and everything is to taste. I enjoyed the hours I spent in the kitchen and often looked at it as another creative outlet, albeit one with more practical applications. I also felt that I learned a lot that went beyond cooking. Patience is a real virtue in the kitchen. Often you’re faced with the choice of making a dish well or making it quickly, and I never regretted the decision to choose the former. Flexibility is also good. Finding you can substitute (or even go without) an ingredient you don’t have and still make a decent meal is a kind of revelation. But the best thing I took away from those early days of trial and error was the importance of mise-en-place.

Mise-en-place, for the uninitiated, is the French culinary term meaning “put in place,” and for some chefs the practice is a veritable way of life. A common mistake among home cooks (myself included, at the start) is to try and prep the ingredients while you’re cooking: chopping the onions while the oil is heating; slicing the tenderloin while the onions are browning, etc. It saves time, to be sure, but it also causes an enormous amount of undue stress as you try to keep all those balls in the air at once. It’s also a surefire way to find your attention being pulled in the wrong direction at a crucial time in the cooking process, often resulting in an unplanned test of your home’s smoke detectors. Murphy’s Law, baby. It’ll get ya every time.

So eventually you find it’s worth the extra time to prep all of your ingredients beforehand and set them up in the order you’ll need them throughout the process. And once you do it, you don’t ever want to back.

That urge to dive right into a project before I have everything in its place is one that has often extended to other areas of my life. Even coming to L.A. to try on the writing hat was a bit of a leap-before-I-look maneuver. But now that I’m here, I’m happy to say I’ve spent the past week applying the discipline of mise-en-place to my efforts.

What has that meant exactly? The first step was to be sure that the scripts I’ve written are as tight and polished as possible. Every “t” crossed, every “i” dotted, all the formatting up to spec, and most importantly, the stories themselves told as sharply, economically and effectively as possible.

The next step was the more difficult one (or, at least, the one I was less enthusiastic about). That had to do with building up some kind of online presence as a writer. A Google search of my name pulls up enough writer-y links to keep me from looking like a complete beginner, so that’s good. I also have profiles listed on Coverfly and FilmFreeway, the two main sites I use to submit my TV scripts to competitions. But more needed to be done.

The first task was to get a profile up on IMDbPro. Luckily I had already been listed for a couple of HGTV shows I’d written for, so I just had to claim those listings. Then it was supplying a bio, some pictures, links to interviews … anything that would beef up my page. These things aren’t intrinsically hard, mind you. I’m just lazy and petulant and didn’t want to do it. But I did it, so that’s good.

I also hosted a script of mine on The Blacklist, which I’m told is one of those screenwriter type things one needs to do. And, of course, that meant building another profile page and all the boring crap that goes into that. Again, not hard. Again, lazy and petulant.

The last piece of the online presence was this here website. I’ve had a lease on the site name for some time but haven’t done anything with it, mainly because I didn’t know what I wanted it to be. A place to promote myself and showcase what I have done/can do, sure. But … isn’t that what all those other online profiles of mine are for? Wouldn’t that make this site kind of … redundant?

So I settled on a blog. Yes, I know — I missed the blog craze by a good fifteen to twenty years. But you know what? I don’t care. I have thoughts that don’t fit within the character limits of Twitter or the agreed-upon length of a Facebook post. Instagram is for pictures, and the other social media sites and apps? I can’t be bothered. I really, really can’t be bothered.

Besides, I’m a writer. What better way is there to showcase myself than to, y’know, write?

So that was my mise-en-place. Is there more I could have done? Probably, but there’s a flip side to mise-en-place where you spend so much time worrying you don’t have EVERY POSSIBLE CONTINGENCY ACCOUNTED FOR that you end up never getting started. That’s a purgatory I was determined to avoid.

I’m at a good place. I can begin. I have begun. I’m prepped.

Why am I here? How did this happen? What’s going on?

(TL;DR version: I wrote a pilot, it won some competitions, I’m seeing what I can do with that. For those who want to do a deeper dive, read on.)

Last fall, in a fit of Covid-inspired pique, I decided I needed to do … something. Something creative. Something for myself. Something that didn’t involve playing the role of parent/teacher/best friend/therapist to my ten-year old son. Something to take the focus off the fact that the training business I had been trying to build since moving from New York to Knoxville four years earlier had gone up in smoke.

Writing was the obvious choice. In a time of social distancing, what better creative outlet could there be? Writing is solitary. It demands isolation. A global pandemic presents no barriers.

But what to write?

My first thought was a novel. I had never attempted to write a novel before, and it seemed like one of those bucket list items I should try. So I tried it. I made it sixty pages. It was not for me.

My next thought was to write a play, or another play I should say. Playwriting was my bread and butter. It was where my writing journey began when I was in the seventh grade, and where it picked up again in New York many years later when I found my acting career floundering. Writing for the theater was, for many years, a passion, and one that had paid off from time to time. As a playwright, I was published, I was produced, I was favorably reviewed in The New York Times. By training, temperament and experience, I was qualified.

I came up with a couple ideas that I thought had legs and zeroed in on the one that was most interesting to me. But as I began to go through the development process, I was hit by a shocking revelation: I had absolutely no desire to write another play. None. Zero. The passion was gone. The interest was gone. Working on a theater piece felt like a chore, not a privilege.

To be honest, it wasn’t really that much of a shock. I’ve had the good fortune to teach and direct at a local children’s theater the past couple of years and have found that work to be rewarding, but other aspects of the theater have left me cold of late. Acting has lost its spark for me. So has singing. Perhaps most tellingly, going to the theater has lost its appeal. I see social media posts from my many theater friends and colleagues, pining for the days when they can return to the theater as both participants and spectators. And my response to those posts is always … meh. I could take it or leave it. Mostly leave it.

So where does that leave me? Where does that leave a guy with a degree in musical theater and a lifetime of professional experience in live performing arts?

Television.

Why TV? Because I love it. Always have. I’m a junkie. Growing up, TV was everything: babysitter, life coach, closest friend. The soundtrack of my childhood are the theme songs to “Taxi” and “Star Trek” and “WKRP in Cincinnati.” “G.I. Joe” taught me right from wrong. Scrooge McDuck taught me I should work smarter, not harder (a lesson I might have taken a bit too literally). “Cheers” and “Night Court,” with their post-9p.m. airings, were my idea of burning the midnight oil.

So I tried my hand at writing a TV pilot. The first couple of drafts were a bit rough, but with the help and advice of a couple trusted writing friends, I got it to a place where I was comfortable sending it out into the world. With no connections to anyone in that part of the industry, this meant writing competitions.

And much to my surprise, it’s done well! I’ve racked up placements as a quarter-finalist, semi-finalist, finalist, “official selection” and one outright win for best original TV pilot. So, yay.

But what does all that mean? What can I do with that?

No matter how many plays I’ve written or how much time I spent sniffing around the edges of show business in New York, the fact of the matter is that I am a newborn babe in the TV writing game. Maybe not even that. Maybe just an embryo. I’m not starting at the bottom; the bottom is still somewhere above me, barely visible in the distance. Because of that, it’s not realistic to think that this pilot I’ve written would ever be greenlit to series. No one would take a person who’s never even stepped foot in a writer’s room and give that goober their own show. But maybe someone will take some level of interest. An agent. A manager. A fairy godmother. Maybe I could get into one of those writer’s rooms. Maybe that could be a start.

So that’s what I’m here to explore. (Also, after 14 months of lockdown, my family just needed to get away, even it’s only to stare at four different walls than the ones we’ve been staring at throughout this plague.) I plan to chronicle that journey here as much as possible. If you’ve made it to the end of this post, perhaps you’ll like to come along for the ride.