Waiting

It's open house night and I'm waiting. We do a lot of that waiting thing here at my school. On any given open house I may see 2-10 parents over a 2-hour period. I was going to wile away the time by watching The Secret Life of Bees, but when I opened the case I discovered a student had stolen the disk while I was at the door greeting kids on their way into class earlier today. It belonged to the school library.

One day, when I'm 80 maybe, I'll finally learn the lesson that you cannot trust teenagers, although I still have this theory that the kid just took the disk home and plans to watch it then return it tomorrow. I will leave the empty case on my desk just in case.

They'll probably go ahead and steal the case, but I still have hope that all will end well because even after everything I'm still convinced that the world is sunshine and rainbows.

Anyway, I'm waiting.

It's been a couple of months now since I sent Not Dead Yet to my manager acquaintance, and since Beefcake sent it to his friend at William Morris who is most likely laid off now and has bigger shit to worry about than what's up with my screenplay. Nicholl won't report back for another couple of months and Austin just got started. There are a couple of other people reading it who are clearly taking their time.

This waiting is annoying. This is exactly what I wanted, of course - a script in circulation. I want to be one of those people who gets a phone call from some studio guy I've never met who read my script and thinks it's FAB-U-LOUS! and wants to give me like eighty bazillion dollars to make it.

I hope people are passing it around to each other in some underground lair we're not allowed to know about because we're not cool Hollywood insiders - you know, the kind of place with no sign and a tiny black door in an alleyway. It could also be a crack den, so you have to be careful.

But that's me, Sunshine and Rainbows. It's far more likely the people who have it didn't read it, or did but went "meh" and deleted the file and the script will now disappear into oblivion. I'm optimistic, not retarded.

But still....

Maybe waiting with excited anticipation is better than the day the Nicholl rejection letter comes again. I wonder how many times you can submit the same script before Greg Beal will send you a cease and desist order?

"Dear Emily Blake, Your zombie movie is still crap. Please stop making us read it. Here is your $30 back. We felt it would be wrong to take it since we're just going to use your script to replenish our toilet paper supplies in the assistants' bathroom."

That would be just like that guy to say something that mean. What a jerk.*

So while I wait for nasty rejection letters from mean old men I spend my time working and researching future projects and trying to write more pages of my martial arts script, although I forgot to bring my laptop to Open House so I can't do any writing now while I have a crapload of time and no Secret Life of Bees to watch. But alas, no laptop means no MovieMagic.

So I wait.

I think I have Don Quixote on VHS somewhere, unless a kid already stole it. They do that, you know.



*Greg Beal is a pleasant man who would never, ever do this.