You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Writing 22 versions of a script and then waiting on people who can barely punctuate to dictate your literary fate.
I’m talking about Literary Agents?
They are like diseased, rabid seagulls hovering over a beach picnic.
When they aren’t excreting a white viscous waste product onto the Earth, they are squawking nonsensical shrieks of delirium.
Literary Agents are flying rats who will steal a french fry from a baby’s mouth, a sliver of tuna from a dumpster, a script from a dying man’s hands.
They are the nescient gate-keepers to the holy land. They hold the key that opens the door where words are birthed onto the screen and into paperback.
Without these barf bags of literary self-indulgence, you will neither succeed nor flourish.
Whew.
That was visceral venom.
Why the scathing brutality on agents, a profession of jackals and blood letters?
Why Not?
They don’t read my S*** anyway, so what do I have to fear.
What are they going to do? NOT PUBLISH ME.
HA. THAT’S A GOOD ONE.
And if any of you literary vampires do read my comments and don’t like the way the words about you curdle, sorry.
I don’t care.
Your decades of inactivity are the equivalent of a journalistic excommunication.
You treat me like the pimple faced teenage boy trying to ask out the prom queen.
Talk to the hand!
You have insulted me, abused me, neglected me, treated me like a younger sibling who doesn’t shower regularly.
I’m sick of you, the power you possess and the fact that I can not attract you to my celestial orbit.
OK. I feel a little better.
Agents. They are ants scurrying down a hot sidewalk each carrying a bread crumb of hope.
They expect us to pass a kidney stone onto the page. They expect us to bleed and sweat and toil for our craft.
Then when you tell us we suck, or we’re not funny, or the third act needs work, you expect us to be stoic, to take our medicine without the same visceral, cathartic impulses that make us write in the 1st place.
You piss on our dreams and want us to pretend it smells like candy cane.
I’m not good at faking it.
Trust me, you bacteria dishes of literary incompetence, it hurts. It hurts plenty.
anyway…Not to bore you with details, but a family member and I wrote a kick ass television pilot.
Who says it’s kick ass?
Well, we do.
And if we don’t believe in it, first and foremost, then who the hell else is going to?
The idea was conceptualized by my family member and then fertilized over time with our collective wit and wisdom.
We wrote the script. Then we wrote the script again. Then we wrote it again and again and again.
22 versions at last count.
“I think it’s done,” one of us said.
We had dead guys in purgatory delivering funny lines in version 17.
By re-write 20 the dead guy in purgatory was dead.
We had Americans becoming British.
“Too British” My family member chirped.
So I made the Brit, who use to be American, less English and more L.A.
We replaced old actors who are geriatric rejects with younger more vibrant actors who are still worn and withered.
We gutted and re-wrote and gutted some more.
At the end of the day, what we wrote was funny and unique. It has a story, and identifiable characters.
The story has star power and commercial potential.
My family member sent the story to his agent.
Tick Tock. Tick Tock.
We waited and waited and waited.
“have you heard from him?”
Crickets.
Winter ice melted off frozen sidewalks in Siberia.
We waited.
The blustery Lions of March were replaced by the baaing lambs of Spring.
We waited.
Tick Tock.
Suddenly the agent man surfaces.
He graces us with his presence and agrees to read the script.
Weeks go by.
He’s as absent as an NBA baby daddy.
Then like a foul stench from the garbage dump, his email is delivered into our inbox.
It clanks with a resounding thud.
He likes the script but he doesn’t like it.
He loves the premise but the story isn’t funny enough, or dramatic enough.
“It’s funny, but not funny enough,” he writes in one exhausting sentence.
It’s a good concept, but not good enough to present to an actual agency that actually produces words into something more than fairy dust.
At the end of the day, he read the script.
Thanks.
At the end of the day his opinion is like a mistimed fart during a quiet scene in an Iron Man movie.
It’s embarrassing.
OOOPs.
His swipe at us was meandering, esoteric, flippant.
He is a flying rat bastard picking scabs off his own flatulating ass.
He hovered above us, crapping on us.
It took him two months to write two run on sentences filled with grammatical imperfection and misguided thoughts.
This guy had enough time to deconstruct War and Peace.
Instead, he urinated across his keyboard in an exercise neither productive or pleasant.
Am I bitter?
You think?
I’m tired of other people holding the key to the kingdom and telling me what I did wrong after I spend months toiling, typing, laboring to produce words that never before existed.
Like a baby bird flapping its wings for the first time on a cool spring morning, we wrote a story that danced off the page.
Our words hovered around the rainbow like a leprechaun’s smile.
We created sunshine on an otherwise cloudy day.
We gave voice to characters who evolved from the muted darkness.
And this agent gives us two run on sentences.
Thanks blood sucker.
Two sentences, a grammatical lobotomy of waste.
A car wreck of desultory verbage designed to say something but which really says nothing at all.
What was meant to be constructive wasted my day like a mutant robo call from the IRS.
Thanks for the response, for the agent belch. It’s little more than a dragon fart in a candy cane scented whirlwind.
There are good agents out there.
They have to deal with thousands of angry, non talented writers to find that diamond in the rough.
Until you discover me, give me my due, I will always think of you as putrid pixie dust.
Until you see the strength in my creative vibe, I will always consider you a castrated marionette puppet in a theater of absurd indecision.
Am I sick of the process?
F*** yeah.
Why do I care what this mutton-chop of words thinks?
Can he write better than me?
I’m laughing.
Wait, I just peed my self.
I could outwrite this guy with my toe nails tied behind my back.
I could fill this page with words so enchanted, they would make a fairy princess wet.
But for some esoteric reason, he holds the key to the kingdom.
The process is the process and finding a way through the gate without the lecherous, flying rat is an exercise that I have yet to master.
So for now, I will write. I will write for you the direct consumer of the words.
I will write to the end of the page and then some.
But to sell a TV pilot?
That’s a horse of another color.
And unfortunately, we probably still need a horse’s ass to get through the gate.
So to you agents out there, to you peddlers of flesh and curdled cheese, take care of the key.
It’s my key. You are just borrowing it. But soon I will expect you to hand it to me so that I may unlock the elusive gate that has acted as a barrier to my dreams for so many decades.
Life’s Crazy™