Who Are You?

Well, you wouldn't know it to look at the rest of this site, but I'm a writer. A screenwriter, to be exact.

It's been gnawing at me lately that this site, while I'm certainly happy with it, does little or nothing to reflect what is currently one of the defining characteristics of my life. I'm a screenwriter. It's why my (unbelievably patient and supportive) wife and I moved out here. I can say with all certainty that it's what I'm best at; it's my calling. It's what I want to do, and it's what I spend a large part of my time doing. I'm not making a living off of it, but what I do make a living off of isn't me. My day job is my day job, and while I work hard at it and do it to the best of my abilities, it's still my day job, it's what pays my bills.

Writing, screenwriting, is what I do; it's what defines me. And yet this site, which defines me to the online world, most of whom will probably never meet me face to face, doesn't really reflect that. Part of that's because I don't talk about my writing, and part of THAT is because I've had a hard time calling myself a screenwriter when I don't make a living off of it, and I don't want to be one of the legion of "schmucks with Powerbooks" who call themselves screenwriters just because they've managed to put some words on a page. But some recent advances have given me a little more comfort in the title, so what the hell, I'll take it.

So, in the coming weeks, or months, as time permits, I'm going to be making some shifts to this site, to reflect this passion that has so far gone unreflected. That includes samples of recent writing in particular, and a shift in focus in general. That said, I don't want this to become "The Life and Times of the Unfulfilled Screenwriter," examples of which can be found by the truckloads on the ol 'Net, and it won't. This won't be, "Writing sucks, I hate my job, no one reads my stuff, I gotta get an agent, etc., etc." That crap's boring and self-absorbed and just pathetic, and I won't have anything to do with it. I'll continue to do here what I've been doing, which is writing about stuff that interests or annoys me(been a bit more of the latter lately, I know, but I'm working on that). But I'll be writing more about writing, too, and the challenge there will be to make that as interesting to the reader as it is to me. 'Cause, you know, I've pretty much dedicated my adult life to it, so I might as well try to explain why.