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Not a TV star

The TV show Heroes was written and shot at Sunset-Gower Studios in Los Angeles, which was fun, because Smallville had been shot in Canada, so most of us in Smallville‘s Los Angeles-based writer/post-production office had seen the actors and crew only once or twice a year.

One time at Sunset-Gower, we were shooting a Heroes “webisode” (a mini-episode for Internet release) and I was on set marking scenes for screen grabs to illustrate a web-based choose-your-own-adventure-style story that would star the same character as the webisode. We were holding for some lighting changes, and I felt out of place just standing there while everyone else was running around — “some guy from the network” — so I went off to one side to look as busy as one could with nothing but a clipboard and five hours of sleep. Around this time, one of the show’s senior actresses came on the set, promptly drawing a crowd of production assistants, writers, and assistant directors. After a minute, I heard people get quiet, and I realized the actress was calling me over. She asked who I was, and we ended up chatting for a couple minutes while everyone else stood there awkwardly for a change.

I enjoyed that more than I should have.

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Not the rent

I’d seen a flyer in the law library and it seemed a little sketchy but I was tired of racing my roommate’s girlfriend to the shower so I drove out for a look. The girl living in the apartment told me that she didn’t want to give it up but she was doing a semester in London and didn’t want to pay rent on it while she was away and I wasn’t really listening because she’d opened the door and the place was so small that if you tripped on the threshold you’d fall out the back window but if you did you’d land on SAND, so much sand and surf and seagulls to the horizon. The rent was half the Los Angeles average, a fact that I was then too new to town to appreciate but which keep me here for the next sixteen years, long after I couldn’t hear the surf and SAND was in the cracks of all I owned.

I’ve changed jobs ten times; my landlord and three generations of their pets have passed away; I’ve outlasted a half-dozen housemates; I’ve replaced my favorite reading chair three times after salt and sun had their way; I’ve brought five girlfriends here, and I’ve also gone years without allowing a soul inside. Some months I’ve never seen the place in daylight, and other months I’ve spent less than an hour away a week. My first pictures of it were taken by cameras with film; my latest are videos with a phone. I’ve clung to this apartment as my most precious possession, and I’ve also raged at it like a cage while thousands of miles away my sisters grew from kids to moms of too many to remember and my parents had brushes with death. I’ve lived in it longer than the house where I grew up; I’ve shared an address with my landlady as long as my mom.

What if I’d never seen that flyer? Lived instead in an expensive Valley condo, forcing me to practice law or leave LA? Would I still love the sun? Would I have still adapted to months without the city and a social circle? Would I have had a dog that I loved or neighbors I hated, or experienced a fraction of the movies and books and games that now pack an imagination like a puzzle box with a picture too big for marriage and mortgage?

It’s cliche that life is the sum of a million decisions, yet half of me is made of one.

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Not a book

One discovery I made soon after deciding to become a writer was that everybody in Los Angeles has a script or novel “in the works” too. I needed to distinguish myself somehow. So in 2002, I set out to, you know, actually write a novel.

Every weekday for four months, I got up at 5:45, wrote for three hours, went to work for nine hours, then went to Starbucks and wrote until they kicked me out. Weekends I spent in the desk chair. Within a few weeks, I started to dream about places in my book. On days off, I would sometimes have this sensation like my main character was somewhere behind me, sitting there in companionable silence.

The most important moment of each night was the ritual of recording my time-spent and total words written on a spreadsheet. Once I put down 8300 words; other days I netted a hundred … or less. One bleak week, I could only find 300 words in five days. But finally, one night, I opened the spreadsheet and discovered that I was just 3000 words from my goal of 110,000. One more scene — already outlined — and the novel would be finished, done, complete. Gone forever.

The next morning, I got up and went to work without writing.

I never finished that book. Thirteen years later, I can still go back to many of the scenes in my head, waiting there silently like a loved one without a living will: not here, but also not gone.