Two years later . . .

[This post originated on my newer blog Payperazzi.  Check out that blog for my latest musings on writing, the writing life, and teaching writing.  I'm publishing it here too on Creating Van Gogh because I first mentioned this subject (briefly) in a CVG post a couple years back.  Consider this an update and a coda.]

Two years ago, I was all set to go into the movie business.  Well, sort of.  Here's what happened.  Early in the summer of 2012 I was contacted by an actress in London, one with reasonably serious stage and screen credits to her name.  In between acting jobs this actress had been serving as an assistant producer on some films.  Now she wanted to produce a film of her own, a short.  And she wanted to base that short on my story "My Word," which she had just read in the online journal Literary Mama.  What's more, if all went will with the short film, she wanted to expand the short into a feature.  You can imagine my surprise and delight.  A film?  Of my story?  Maybe a feature?! This opportunity felt like it had dropped out of heaven and into my lap.   The whole thing was as bizarre and amazing and exhilerating as it was unexpected.  After all, although I have a strong and abiding interesting in writing plays--and in the entire art of stagecraft--I've never, unlike so many of my undergraduate students, had the least interest in writing a screenplay or getting involved in the business of putting a movie together.  And yet here was this movie-making opportunity; from a credible, connected source.  I wasn't about to say no.   And I didn't.

Due to various delays--some unavoidable; some which struck me as quite avoidable--it took two months before the actress had a contract to show me.  But finally in early August she faxed it to me, and I signed it.  The contract would cover a period of two years.  And it would only apply to the short.  I wouldn't be paid for my story, but I would receive co-producer credit on the film, and my specified duties would include reviewing and commenting on the screenplay, which she was determined to write herself.  (I had asked around to various people in the know, and what I heard was that with a short film the writer usually just gives the story away for the sake of publicity.  "But," the same gurus said, "if she does decide to make a feature you need a new contract, one that pays you actual money.  Because if it's a feature there's going to be more money involved.")  After the delays in getting the contract finalized it looked like the project was finally about to take off.  The actress was begining a three week vacation (in America, ironically), and she had decided that it was to be a writing vacation.  In a phone call from her vacation spot, she told me that she would have a screenplay ready to show me in a week.  And she was certain that the film would not only be started but in the can in no more than a year.  Sounded great.

I checked in with her via email after a week, only to be told that she hadn't actually started writing yet.  But she was about to, she said; I should give her another week.  When I checked in the next week, however,  she said she had encountered some problems in the writing and had decided to read a novel by John Steinbeck to give her some ideas on structure.  Hmmm.  Okay.  When I emailed her a week after that I received no reply.  At some point she must have shut down her vacation and flown back to England, but she did so without sending any further word about the supposedly imminent screenplay.   That fall I emailed her semi-regularly--just light, friendly messages--hoping for good news.  I didn't actually ask about the screenplay; I just wanted to keep lines of communication open.  Mostly she didn't respond to my messages, but sometimes she did.   She only addressed the screenplay once.  She said she still hoped to get to it, but she had two or three other projects to get to first.  Oh.  Eventually she stopped responding to my emails altogether, so I just let it go.   If she really did want to do this movie, I figured, she would contact me.  But she didn't.

And she hasn't.

Now, two years later, the movie project based on my short story appears to have been long since scuttled without ever having been launched.  And now that the contract has expired there's little to no chance of the project being resurrected.  Every now and then I check the actress's IMDb resume of acting and producing gigs, in hopes of noticing some reference to our film.  But nothing's been added to her resume in over a year, so I have to wonder if she's even in the business anymore.   I guess so far this post makes me sound bitter.  Maybe I am; just a little.  But, honestly, not that much.  Even when it appeared that all systems were go and my story was about to generate a movie, the project didn't feel real to me.   It felt instead like some kind of pretend amendment to my life.  To my actual life--the one with my family--but also, just as importantly, to my writing life: which is about composing fictions.  (Btw, that August, while I was waiting on the screenplay that never came, I did reconfigure "My Word" as a one-act play.  I wanted to be able to imagine it as words and movements only, in order to be better prepared to "consult" when the time came.  I didn't really write it in order to be performed, but I did publish it last year in the online journal Foliate Oak.)

Looking back on this curious episode, I'm tempted to try to draw some lesson from it.  But the only lesson I can draw is one I already knew at the time.  That is: Know who you are and keep doing what you do.  After all, it's the only thing that's really yours; the only thing you can control.  Even as I emailed and phone conferenced with the actress, even as I hoped for and looked forward to her screenplay, even as I prepared myself to help with it, even as I was disappointed that it never came,  I kept working on stories.  I wrote new stories; I revised previous ones.  It's who I was.  It's who I am.  It's what I do.  Now, two years later, I have a book of short stories called  Island Fog forthcoming from Lavender Ink press in New Orleans, and I couldn't be happier.  Lavender Ink is clearly serious about the project.  Lavender Ink has promotional plans.  Heck, Lavender Ink answers my emails!  And still, even as I busy myself this summer with marketing work on the book--lining up reviews in magazines and on blogs, drawing up plans for a late fall book tour, consulting with the woman who will be designing my website--I'm composing new stories.  It's who I am.  It's what I do.  Any life and any career will encounter setbacks.  This includes a writing career.  And with a writing career the best way--the only way, I think--to handle any setback is to keep writing.  It's hard to concentrate on, or even remember, bitterness from a lost opportunity when you're engaged in creating a new story with new characters and all new oppoertunites.   The story of your last story falls away and all you see is the story of the new one: the potential there and the pleasure.  Suddenly you're thinking not about the recent past but the future, the future of this story.  After all, in two years who knows where it could be?

Strange days indeed

(Most peculiar, mama.)  That line from the old John Lennon song "Nobody Told Me" has been running through my head these last couple of weeks.  I don't know about where you are, but for me and mine the summer just passed was mighty strange indeed.  It kicked off in early June when a close colleague of my wife was arrested for a sex crime; a shock and a tragedy on many levels, one being that it badly discredited an organization she has given her heart to for ten years and overnight made her job much much harder.  In July, during the halcyon early days of a marathon east coast vacation, we checked our cell phone to find two frantic messages from the woman who was minding our dog back home: 1) the dog had blood in his feces and she was rushing him to the veterinarian, and 2) (later) the vet was not yet sure what the problem was, but thought it could be the return of parvo, the disease the came within an inch of taking our dog's life when he was a puppy and which the vet assured us he could never catch again. (Turns out, it was nothing.)   Later in July, not twenty minutes after I told my mother we needed to leave earlier from her house in southern Maryland--"just in case something happened" on our way to Durham--the air conditioning died in our Toyota Sienna.  The temperature outside was 104˚.  Needless to say, it became impossible for us to make it to Durham without a long and rather costly service stop.  The same month, on the same vacation, it was so freezing cold in my father-in-law's air-conditioned basement that I had to wear a sweatshirt to bed and sleep under a quilt.  Around this time word came to us, from a variety of sources, that a very prominent southern literary and lifestyle magazine--one housed at my university--had locked out its employees.  Moreover, the head editor and founder of the magazine, along with his co-editor girlfriend, had been fired for inappropriate behavior toward interns.  Far from a mere local scandal, news of this miserable affair actually made it into the New York Times.  In August, Mitt Romney decided that Paul Ryan, of all people, would make his candidacy more palatable to the 99% who will be savaged by his policies.  A week later my philosophical Episcopalean son announced that he was a deist and also that for his birthday present he wanted to dye his hair black.  (This son, without benefit of dye, has the most beautiful chestnut brown hair you'll ever see on any living being.  Go figure.)  In June, a blog post I wrote that complained about the criminal indifference of administrators to faculty at my university went viral across the university and the state.  People who'd never read my blog were embracing it; people I'd never met were congratulating me.  A faculty member--who had already taken a job at another school all the way across the country--cornered me in a stairwell and told me we needed to organize a sit-down strike in front of the administration building.  Yes, well.

But you know, there's always an upside to strange.  Lennon's song is bouncy and jocular, but it's also severely critical of the era in which it was written.  I can't say that about my summer.  Wonderful, extraordinary, and equally unexpected things happened as well.  At a conference in June, Robert Olen Butler, a man I'd never had the honor to meet, happened to visit a session in which I was reading one of my historical fictions--not to see me, of course, but to see the other presenter--and wound up telling me how much he enjoyed the story and asking me questions about the collection it's housed in.   At the same conference a woman I had a three minute conversation with--an American, she is permanently situated at a university in France--offered to let me and/or my family stay at her place if and when I or we happen to pass through Angers.  I and we might have to take her up on that!  (The graciousness of people can be truly humbling sometimes.)  In August, after ten years of thinking about a novel, and researching and thinking more and researching more and drafting and redrafting and being distracted by other projects and redrafting some more and finally getting feedback from friends about the project, my wife got off the phone, walked into our living room and announced "I think I've found an agent!"  (Not only an agent, it turns out, but the perfect agent for her.)  Perhaps most wild of all, in June, after a strange little story of mine was published in the online journal Literary Mama, I received an email from a movie producer in England who wanted to use the story as a basis for a short film.  And possibly, later, a feature.  Most peculiar, Mama.  This story was something I drafted a year and a half ago in a notebook in a UCA classroom while my students were all attempting to write fictions in their notebooks.  I put it aside for at least six months.  Then came I back to it, revised it, read it at a literary conference last February, and decided that, yes, I really did like it after all.  So I was happy that it finally found a home in a special Father's Day edition of Literary Mama.   But a movie?  Strange days, indeed.

I recall some sage advice I once received from Darrell Bourque, my dear, now retired, dissertation director at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.  Reviewing my discussion of postmodernism in the introduction to my dissertation, Darrell noted a certain kind of disapproval--or maybe it was merely overseriousness--in my tone.  "Remember," he said, "for a postmodern chaos doesn't just mean uncertainty; it doesn't just mean darkness; for a postmodern chaos is the state with the most inherent possibility."  Hear, hear.  In the chaos of this summer, sad things certainly happened (I haven't even mentioned the shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Times Square), but possibilities also arose that I could never have imagined a year ago.  Will these possibilities be realized?  Or will they displaced or superseded by others? I have no living idea.  But what's clear to me now, as it should have been all along, is that despite how I might try to plan for and predict and structure the future, I can't actually know where my life will take me by next summer.  I can't know what else that is new and unexpected and literally unimaginable will be presented in the next twelve months.  Life is just that strange and just that chaotic.  And thank god for it, people.   Because I can swear for sure that that's where the beauty lies.