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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 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.