UPDATE: SUMMER 2009...

Sorry for being away for so long. It’s been a crazy couple of months.

On the personal side: the house I live in has been getting a major makeover. New paint job, new carpeting, some construction. Right now the place looks like a typhoon hit it.

Then my parked car got totaled by some idiot who wasn’t paying attention to where he was driving. It all worked out: I got a slightly newer, marginally better car.

Then my somewhat off-kilter ex-wife came into town and turned my life upside down for a couple of weeks. (The poor girl has some, um, issues.)

But yup, it’s been a fairly hectic summer. No time for some of the luxuries I usually enjoy. To wit, I typically blaze through four or five movies from Netflix each week. I’m now down to a mere one movie a week. Yikes!

On the professional front: I recently completed a quick writing gig. A proposal for a reality series. Just three pages. Fun and creative. Easy money.

I’m waiting to start work on creating a treatment for an existing story (not mine) for a producer here in town. The person I'll be working with is a pretty well-known music producer. Should be fun.

I’m also gearing up to do a co-write job on an existing script with a “writer” up in Seattle. We still have some contractual issues to iron out, but hopefully it’ll all come together in the next week or so.

Last month my manager brought me three potential gigs: two page-one rewrites and one from-scratch assignment. Alas, not one of these jobs actually materialized for me. C’est la vie.

I’ve been doing a fairly steady stream of script critiques. (I guess summer is when people need critiques!) A couple of the scripts were, quite surprisingly, pretty decent. They need a lot of work, but they might actually become marketable. Hopefully I gave the writers what they need to get their scripts whipped into shape.

As for my Web-series My Roommate Sam: I just got word that the first episode has nearly completed post-production and will soon premier. Geesh, finally.

A play I wrote—yes, a play, and the only one I’ve ever written—just got picked up by a theater group here in L.A. It’s scheduled to go up for two weekends next month. This could go over well or it could become a dismal abomination. We’ll just have to hope for the best and see where it goes. (If it does become an abomination, I'll be thankful that it's only a play and not captured forever on film.)

A couple months ago I mentioned that I was planning to do a follow-up interview with UK screenwriter Darren Howell. I have yet to do it...but I will. Soon.

And finally...I’m giving very serious thought to shutting down my website The Working Screenwriter. What I’m planning to do is transfer all the info on the site over to a standard blog (like the one you’re reading now). I think it’ll work just fine. It’ll have all the same great information for the novice and intermediate scribe—and I won’t have to pay a fee every year to keep it running. (Anyway, I never ever liked the way the website looked.) If I do this, and I’m sure I will, it’ll happen in the next few weeks. I’ll keep you posted.