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

October 15, 2001

No admission under two years old
Elation has turned into exhaustion as I try to recuperate from the last three days. From oblique agents' notes that offer little other than to ask that our scripts "sizzle" and "blaze." From two days of intensive rewriting. From my partner in composition, who was at times so disconcerted by the combination of Anthrax attacks, Afghanistan bombings, and World Trade Center demise that he displayed a rainbow of mercurial emotions while we wrote.

When we finished the rewrites last night I was Abdelkhader El Mouaziz winning the New York Marathon. Jonas Salk discovering the vaccine for polio. Superman saving a small fishing village from Lex Luthor's ray gun despite being weakened by Kryptonite. But that was yesterday.

Today my partner has left for southern climes hoping to find his emotional equilibrium (or at the very least a good time). I am left to speak with our agents and, while assuring them that we have addressed almost all of their comments, convince them that a particular scene they had concerns about is indeed funny and should remain unchanged. Should they agree to this (and I'm relatively certain they will), I'll prepare yet another pair of manuscripts and FEDEX them to LA.

The summer between my junior and senior years of college I worked as a ride operator at Rye Beach Playland, an amusement park in Westchester, New York. I was assigned to Kiddyland, a section of the park featuring safer, slower, smaller versions of adult rides suitable for tykes. One of these attractions was the very popular Kiddy Carousel, which each day inevitably played host to a youngster who would plead, cajole, and cry at the end of a completed ride in an attempt to get one more go-around for free. Sometimes a parent or two, trying to appease the child, would beg me to give into little Fenster, despite the lack of an admission ticket. But under the careful eye of a park supervisor, I would always have to physically remove the child, usually incurring some injury along the way. I am desperately hoping that my scripts have not become a nightmarish version of this ride; my agents at the ready to plead, cajole, and cry for more revisions, yet never producing the job opportunities I need to keep the music playing as I watch them go round and round.

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