This journal documents the author's experiences as a television writer. To read the story from its inception, go to the beginning.

October 11, 2001

Another curve
My writing partner has an annoying habit: he will occasionally leave town unexpectedly. Sometimes I will get as much as four days notice, as I did today. Sometimes less, as when, in the middle of writing our Becker spec, he announced he was taking a six day weekend in the Caribbean 48 hours before his departure. Often I don't mind because his trips coincide with periods of time when we are taking a break from writing or engaged in other endeavors such as marketing our scripts and talents. But the week of vacation he is taking starting this coming Monday couldn't be timed more poorly: we are supposed to have a teleconference with our agents within the next couple of business days and then begin another set of rewrites.

When I spoke with my partner on the phone this evening, I asked him what would happen if we didn't finish the rewrites this weekend, his last two days in town before he leaves. He replied, "The rewrites will just have to wait a week." And in that short sentence � in those simple notes of Nero's fiddle � lies the crux of my frustration.

I have been striving to earn a living at something I love, probably since my first steps. My mother, a criminal court reporter for twenty years, would return home each day from her ministrations recording a stenotype transcription of the day's legal proceedings and launch into a diatribe of how she hated her job and, unfortunately, her life. It was her daily leitmotif. The wound that would never heal. A lesson I carry with me as I spend most of my waking hours either contemplating or executing ways to further my dream of working as a creative artist in the entertainment industry.

My writing partner will never be as committed to this career of writing for television as I. It's not in his make-up. Just as I would never take a vacation in the middle of rewrites, he will never take a week off from his day job to devote more time to our writing (as I did twice before I quit my day job). But perhaps more to the point is the emotional fallout from his ill-timed departure. Namely that I feel abandoned.

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