slaneporter.com

Cryptic details.

I don’t speak much about myself on this blog because I try to keep my writing life and my personal life separate. I’m not famous, so who the F cares. I feel like opening up.

Someone on twitter recently asked: “If you could travel through space-time to any location or time, where/when & why?”.

This is a loaded question for me.  My answer would have to be: South Coast Repertory Theatre, 1999, Costa Mesa, California.  I would leave my 1999 self a note that read, “Leave the Play-Doh at Home”.

Cryptic enough isn’t it?  Only a few people would understand the reference.

After analyzing my initial answer it made me re-think everything in a Ghost of Christmas Past sort of way.  If the clay had been left at home, connections would not have been made, muses would have been destroyed and I might not have fully realized my passion to become a writer.  Or maybe I would have in another way or another time. The one thing I now know is that ten years of occasionally brushing up against the past has created a screenplay that is quite possibly about to be produced.  Am I angry about my choices? Sometimes. Looking back I was so naive and someone took advantage of that, whether consciously or unconsciously. The burn still stings.

But from the flames, the phoenix rises once more to assign memories I want to forget to characters I’ve put down on paper.  Let them worry about the past, because what was once mine is now theirs and I no longer have to mull over it.

I guess I’m satisfied with the direction I went. It’s hard to speculate where I would have ended up if I did leave the Play-Doh at home. I can’t imagine what life would have been like otherwise.