I got nothing this morning. My projects taunt me. The falling apart notebook with the story of my pottery lessons in the backyard garden of an old man with life lessons. The letters I wrote from London to my family trying to mask my depression. The letters sent to me when I was in the hospital for said depression. The screenplay about two employees who work on a dating site and want to date each other but are too fucked up. The screenplay about a book editor who falls in love with a neanderthal. The screenplay about a tik tok influencer and a washed up thirty-something actor from a beloved tv show. The book about adult siblings. The The book about things that ring true.
What’s in your drawers?
photo: wiki
Filed under: screenplays, Screenwriting, self-loathing, Writers, Writing |
Betsy Lerner 
Keep going with those projects. The husband of a friend of mine was working on a novel for years, writing on weekends and holidays while holding down a job in fashion. His debut, Shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize in 2020. Another buddy has been plugging away since the millennium, writing screenplays in his spare time. His first movie, The Kill Room, stars Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson and opens in theaters next month. Your experience gives you a leg up (what does that mean, exactly?) on both those guys. And I am so there for the book editor and the neanderthal love story.
Hi, Betsy. You always make me smile. Thanks! Jude
Accordion files by project, Excel spreadsheets (submission plan, list of pubs and rejections, a revised 10 yr. life plan, ugh!), completed manuscripts, notebooks from the last 20 years, and a stuffed toy I call the purple-people eater, a kind nursing home employee left on my dying mother’s pillow. Seriously, when I open the drawers, I smile.
An attempt at a memoir about someone else-, but me being part of it. A love story about a recovering addict living in a remote mountain cabin and the woman who visits periodically to check in on him. A short piece on the current state of the Republican party, basically telling them to stop whining.
Other than that, I keep my favorite t shirts in a drawer that is secure enough to keep rodents in my remote mountain cabin from shredding them for nest material; touch my R. Crumb VW bus parked outside the Dew Drop Inn shirt and you die little mousey mouse.
Thanks for asking. Too many to list. Short stories, novels, plays. A few small prose pieces published. It seems foolish and even impossible to stay on this path, but I’m staying until I go over the final cliff.
My own ‘it can happen to you’ true story. Every struggling families story. Every living paycheck to paycheck dream come true. It happened to us.
I’ve lots of stuff. Who knows? I don’t.
“What’s in your drawers?”
Wouldn’t you like to know. Hey, baby . . .
Looks like a mushroom, old man.
Such scandalous talk! Where are my pearls?
“Hey, buddy, watchyer mout — dere’s families here.”
I have so many projects — finished, unfinished, abandoned, forsaken, ghosts haunting me down every virtual hall, digital chains a-clank, skeletons in every closet, that actual file cabinet right there next to the desk, stuffed with who-knows-what, can you even get it open?
At least I suffer from no shortage of material.