Psycho-Kyle, qu'est que ç'est?

I crashed into...no...no...I drifted into one of my black moods, where nothing was any good and I didn't know what the fuck I was doing and felt like I'd wasted my life following the one thing I should never have bothered with -- writing screenplays. Because I have no idea how to really do them. And here I was still fucking writing a script to achieve nothing. As if I had no control over my direction in life. As if I were a junky and writing for film was my drug.

It started quietly, like a slow-rising flood, but grew deeper and deeper until I was quite...shit...lost and whatever self-confidence I had went hiding. All I could see was the mistakes I'd made in everything, and I nearly drowned in the belief I was screwing up Brendan's story. A story I've been working at and avoiding and hiding from, myself, for...well, to be honest, thirty-five years, since the first germ of the idea of the story came to me while I was living on Branard Street in Houston.

I didn't really do anything with it for years, just sort of poked at it. I was caught up in working on other projects...like Cutting Edge, a little action-thriller set in Houston, and adapting John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World into The Cowboy King of Texas. It was originally titled King of the Cowboys but after I won Best Screenplay at the Houston International Film Festival, in 1990, and got press for it, Roy Rogers' estate sent me a letter saying that phrase had been trademarked for him so I couldn't use it. My first real taste of being fucked over by the industry I'd stupidly decided to be a part of.

But I'm finally coming out of this mood. Back in recovery from screenwriting. I had a nice conversation with Brendan who told me, "If you don't write my story, it don't get wrote." Plain and simple. So MTK goes to the side. Dair's Window gets pushed back. And I focus on A Place of Safety-New World For Old and Return...and then the whole book, to work in whatever ideas and needs that come up.

I guess feeling obligated to my characters is what keeps saving me.