I'm Splitting for Arizona Tomorrow

...to hang with my family for Thanksgiving. I'll be gone through Sunday. But, thanks to the magic of laptop technology, and the fact that I'm now self-employed, my productivity will take only the slightest of hits.* It's gonna be a work week, with a brief pause to eat a bird.

Plus, I'm working on the third draft of EXTRADITION. As soon as that's done, I've promised to turn around and work on DESERT RUN. But I've got a horror spec kicking around in my head... I might take a quick detour to crank it out so it'll stop bugging me, something I do every once in a while to keep screenwriting from turning into work. I'll give myself a week... if it's not done in seven days, it gets saved until DESERT RUN is done.

So feel free to break into the lair while I'm gone, though there won't be much to steal... I've spent the last month getting rid of almost everything I own. I'm once again down to the bare essentials. I've found that I feel like my life is figuratively less cluttered when I get rid of the literal clutter. The less I'm lugging around, the happier I am.

On my birthday, I caught a screening of UP IN THE AIR. Clooney's character does these speaking engagements in which he asks people to imagine putting everything they own into a backpack, and think about how heavy it is. Now... the point of that is to show he's a guy who doesn't like attachments - he continues the analogy into relationships. I wouldn't go that far, but when it comes to stuff, I 100% agree.

And I'd like to thank everyone who sent me birthday wishes, and helped me celebrate on either the actual day or this past weekend. I have a feeling this next year is gonna be a big'un...

By the way, LEFT 4 DEAD 2 is awesome.

* Unless my laptop craps out yet again.

Today is My Birthday

Now that I'm self-employed, I have the freedom to sit around all day playing LEFT 4 DEAD 2, followed with super-drunken action.

Not me. I'm gonna celebrate, don't get me wrong. But there's no better present than seeing this business take off, so I'm putting in a full day. Shit, I've been working since 8am.

Sincere thanks to everyone who's sent me birthday wishes... I see this less of a celebration that I've been hanging around for another year, than a celebration of all the cool stuff that's gone on for the past twelve months. And with everything on the horizon, it's looking like my next b-day will be a sweet reward for all of the hard work.

The First 30 Days

As of today, Samurai MK has been in existence for thirty days.

I'm still laying groundwork, but at it's definitely coming together by degrees. Regardless, I haven't let that stop me from getting work done, developing a slate for the spring sell season, getting a script out to a director, and shopping a novel. I don't expect to make sales during the holidays, so I'm not fretting that part... this is the build-up time for first quarter 2010.

Some lessons learned:

If you think something will take an hour, it'll take a day.

If you think it'll take a day, it'll take two days.

If you think something will take two days, it'll require a week.

And if you think something will take a week, odds are you'll still be futzing with it a month later.

The trick, I've found, isn't to sit around and cry about how mean and inefficient the world is... it's a matter of being productive in the interim so, when you are back on track, your focus is 100% on the tasks at hand.

But the major thing I've learned is the doom of the entrepreneur: I have so much stuff to do - all of it important and time-intensive - that, even if I'm doing one thing, I'm feeling guilty about putting everything else off while the task in front of me gets handled. There's no such thing as priority... it's all priority in some way. The only way to be truly happy would be to have a gang of Jango Fett clones all doing everything at once.

Meanwhile, I'll just have to made do with what I have every day: two hands and twenty-four hours.

On the massive plus side, since I'm no longer bound by anything like official office hours, I'm actually getting a healthy amount of sleep. I'm getting to the gym almost every day, because doing so no longer requires getting up at the crack of dawn or lugging my ass over there after a twelve-hour day, still thinking about the writing I need to do.

This doesn't sound like a huge deal, but I think this attention to baseline quality-of-life will have further repercussions in my work and productivity. Being able to hit the gym at noon gives me a clarity throughout the rest of the afternoon when, before, I'd start to lag at four or five. Getting sleep means I don't have to prop myself up with caffeine in the morning (though I still do, because I like black coffee).

And, outside of technical difficulties, there's nothing getting in the way of focus on projects in which I believe. I'm only signing projects I 100% love. Every title on my slate is a high point.

Thirty days in, and I'm loving it more every morning I wake up and realize my destiny is within my power.

Here's Why You Shouldn't Buy a Gateway Laptop

Back in 2006, I was broke as fuck. I mean... living off ramen noodles and stacks of quarters broke. But that's what life was like in 2004 and 2005, so I was kinda used to it by that point.

But that didn't diminish my dismay when the PC I'd bought in 2002 finally staggered and died in my arms. No amount of tech support calls so I could talk to some guy sitting in India, reading me pre-packaged responses taken from a color-coded plastic binder could fix it.

By an AMAZING coincidence, right then I got a bonus check for DEMON KEEPER. Sometimes, the karma pays off. It wasn't that much, I had bills and, long/short, I couldn't dump the whole bonus on getting something whizz-bang awesome. Since I spent so much time at the office, all I really needed a home computer for was to write. I needed a typewriter, end of story.

So I went to Best Buy and scored the Gateway laptop I have now. It was on sale. It was cheap. It wasn't super-powerful but - again - I just needed a typewriter. Boom, bought it.

From 2006 to 2009, it gave me nary a peep of trouble. I had exactly two programs running on it... Final Draft (for scripts) and Word (for everything else).

On 10/15 2009, I worked my last day at the office. On 10/16 2009, I started my own business, Samurai MK. I now had to ask my laptop to do a bit more. Realize... not MUCH more. I'm not exactly rendering CGI over here. I'm talking email, Office... and little else. Basic, basic computer-type stuff.

At every opportunity the Gateway had the chance to step up to the modest challenges, it failed.

The first week of business, I was connecting to the internet via wireless. Suddenly, the laptop decided it didn't want to, anymore. So I called Warner cable, and wasted a day of productivity waiting for those guys to show up. They did, I got DSL installed. Back to work, right?

Hardee-har.

I couldn't install Office because, guess what? The disk reader didn't want to work. Okay... hunt around online, find the best-rated repair place in LA. Drive it over there... they don't work on Gateway. Okay, who does? THIS guy works on Gateway... fine, thanks. Drive over to the other guy's place. He checks it out, has to order a new part. Okay, I expected that, go for it. And while he's at it, throw in some extra memory so it doesn't take a hundred years to open an email. My laptop was suuuuuper slow.

But guess what, number two? It's Friday, which means we're going into the weekend, so it's gonna be an extra couple of days of fucking around, waiting for the Pony Express delivery rider to show up from China.

Meanwhile, the laptop eats a script I was literally within an hour of turning in. Luckily for me, Leonard was able to hunt it up. Whew.

Get the laptop back from the dude. It reads disks, it runs fast. AWESOME. Now I can - at last - get back to work without dealing with random bullshit...

Man plans, and God laughs, while computers sing a sad, sad song.

On Wednesday - THREE DAYS after getting it back the first time - the screen suddenly goes gray. What the fuck?! Nothing I do fixes it. Fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuckin'-

FUCK.

Call the dude back. Sure, bring it in... tomorrow.

I spend the rest of that night not getting work done. Next day, bring it in. You know you're in trouble when an experienced, well-reviewed repair guy looks at your laptop and says, "What the hell?" He'd never seen this before. He's gotta take it apart, figure it out.

Shit.

Swing over by John's, get some email written and read and some light work done, but a bunch of stuff is going only partially done, or not done at all, due to technical difficulties beyond my control.

The next day, I call the dude. The laptop is not done yet. I'm pacing. I call him back and let him know that I need this thing so I can get some work done. Monday isn't gonna work. He says... call me first thing tomorrow morning.

To his credit, HE calls ME. Nine am today. Saturday. I swing out, get the machine. He explains that the FUCKING SCREEN has failed. Do I have an external monitor to which I can hook it? Sure... one of the benefits of going through all of my shit and getting rid of stuff is the fact that I have an EXACT inventory of what I currently own (less and less, thank God). In the past, I would have hemmed and hawed and gone home, sweating and hoping that I had a monitor. In this case, I knew for an absolute fact that I had a monitor, because I'd spent half an hour dusting it off a couple of days ago. So... the answer was YES, I DO have a monitor.

Again to his credit: I asked him how much I owed him. He said nothing. It's not a total fix, but he got me back to work for free. As a start-up entrepreneur... that's music to my ears. Good karma all around.

Now my laptop works, and I have a screen by which I can work it. Only thing is, I have this full-sized monitor perched on top of the laptop, which obviates its use as a portable computing tool in the first place. Right now, it's basically just a weak tower.

I would like to congratulate Gateway for making and selling products which are, at least, consistent... consistently disappointing, at every single fucking turn.

Another long/short... this whole episode only drives me to succeed that much more. I'm burning with a desire not just to be rich, not just to have credits and gets books published and movies produced, but also to own a Mac rig that won't fuck with me so much that the work of starting a business and getting it off the ground has been exponentially harder because of something that SHOULD be making my life easier.

So let me wrap up this little bitch session and get back to work before my laptop dreams up a new way to fail...

The moral of story: don't buy Gateway.

* As an addendum, every cloud has a silver lining. Even though I can't lug my laptop to a hipster H'wood coffee shop and get work done, and the rig is a bit Frankenstein'd together... a separate monitor is a much easier format on which to read scripts. So there ya go...

And There Was Much Rejoicing

After slightly less than one billion years, the parts that will lead to the upgrading and repairing of my laptop have arrived. I go now to get them installed.

And there was a mighty huzzah!

Books and Clothes

As part of my continuing efforts to rid myself of old patterns and further streamline my life, I've been going through everything I own and losing as much as possible.

To that end, I've been putting a little time into it each day, and a lot of time when able.

Last week, I leaned into my books. I have a lot. Most of them, I read once and set aside. I can't throw away a book, so instead they collect in stacks in my closet and next to my bed. Ugh. I sat down and separated them into two stacks: Core Titles, and Books that Can Go Away.

You call a stack of books something like "Core Titles," and you expect it to be small, an elite squadron of the best of the best. But I define a Core Title as any book that I could imagine myself wanting to re-read, and being bummed that it isn't just sitting on a shelf, patiently waiting for that happy moment.

True, the over-riding rule of my stuff purge has been "anything I haven't used, touched, read, listened to or worn in the past year... goes." Books are the exception. For instance, I don't read THE MASTER AND MARGARITA every year, but I definitely get back into that one every couple of years. It stays. My stack of Core Titles is higher than expected.

I've been taking the Books that Can Go Away to the library in lots of twenty or so at a time. I don't want to overwhelm them. They get a little persnickety if you dump a ton of books in their laps. Instead of thinking, "Boy howdy, free books!", they see it as work. Such is the life of a librarian.

I did a quick cull of my clothes last week. That wasn't hard. But it wasn't until last night that I really got into it, doing a load of laundry, emptying the closet and throwing the entire sad affair into a big pile on my bed to be sorted and judged.

Some interesting facts quickly came to light:

a) I have a ton of fucking socks. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was idly thinking of getting more black socks. I was re-washing the same six or seven pairs every week. But that seemed weird... I have this giant pile of socks sitting around, right? Why do I keep going back to the same pairs? What's going on with that?

In truly spreading them all out and taking a good, hard look at this sock situation, I recognized an emerging pattern... Whenever I did laundry and put it away and found a single sock without a brother, I'd set it off to the side. I don't know why... perhaps, in the back of my mind, I thought the other one would show up from under the bed or from behind a dresser or something. This went on for SEVEN YEARS, finally bringing me to the moment I was standing next to my bed, shaking my head at a pile composed of dozens of single socks.

See what I mean? We do stuff... not exactly NOT thinking about it, but BARELY thinking about it, just enough to go through a series of motions without any actual thought. Though this is so minor I'm almost embarrassed by the fact that I'm blogging about adventures in my sock drawer, but God is in the details. In some small way, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm in the process of ridding from my life.

Fucking SOCKS, dude. I don't even know what to do with the goddamn things. Do I give a big pile of single socks to Goodwill, and inflict my mismatched sock curse on a charitable organization? Or do I toss 'em?

b) I found a stack of pants I'd brought out with me from Chicago. They're all khakis and such, business casual-type pants. I thought, "Ah ha, more pants." A good thing. Again, you never know what your true resources are until you look. But then I tried them on... and they were all too big. When I came out to LA, I was wearing a 34. These days, I'm either a 30 or 32, depending on the specific pair. I don't really feel any different, but I guess I'm in better shape these days.

Well, there's some good news, huh?

I Have Signed Seven Clients

I could sign more, but I have put a momentary pause on my search for new talent unless someone/thing strikes me as the most absolutely brilliant thing ever.

The reason are both practical and symbolic.

Practical: I'm still in the process of getting the infrastructure of this company together. From incorporation to office supplies, everything takes three times longer than I expect it to, and then I'm always learning about something new I've "forgotten."

I've worked for myself twice before: my record label, and when I was a PA/grip. Both times, I wasn't very serious about the foundation. I was perhaps immature in that sense and, to the surprise of no one, neither endeavor turned into anything successful.

This is a blessing and a curse. A curse in the sense that neither company made me wealthy. A blessing because, if they had, I wouldn't be in a situation in which I could do my current work.

Samurai MK is the basis of what I'm now finding to be my true life's work. For that reason, I'm taking this as seriously as fuck, taking my time and doing it right. Thus, it's time expended. The remaining time is better spent doing a good job for my birds in hand, rather than theoretical birds in the bush.

Symbolic: This company is called Samurai MK. I have signed my Seven Samurai.

Dawn, Gabi, Steve, Scott, Ramsey, Alex, Lesley: I owe you all a deep debt for your belief. I'll pay it off with my blood, sweat and tears. My sword used to belong to a company. Now it belongs to you, my Seven Samurai.

Hagakure tells us that anything can be done, if only you decide that it WILL be done.

I WILL see every one of these projects move forward, in some way. Time and work are meaningless when compared to results. Every waking moment - and many sleeping moments - are bent toward that purpose. Only death will stop me.

So... let's strap on our daisho and rock this joint.