Once More, With Feeling

In the interest of full disclosure, I am reposting here an essay I published over on my Substack; you'll see right away that it's a few months old. If you're reading this, you might find my Substack interesting -- I use it as a place to discuss writing, pop culture, and just about anything else that gets my brain working. Most of the content there is free, but I'm also working on a novel there, which I'm keeping strictly for my paying subscribers. Please join me over there if you're so inclined.

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So, I’ve already mentioned Hamnet twice in this newsletter — don’t worry, I’m not getting into it again, I’ve already said what I have to say — and there’s a very good reason why I like it so much. It gave me that thing that I want to give to all of you when I‘m writing…the one thing I’m least confident in my ability to do.

It made me feel.

The whole point here is to evoke emotion, to make you feel excitement, fear, and yeah…pain. Rage, even. That brings me to last week’s episode of The Pitt.

The wife and I absolutely love The Pitt. We didn’t start the first season until a few weeks before the second began…but we finished it with plenty of time to spare, mainly because we couldn’t stop watching.

Without getting into too much detail, Alma and I have way too much experience with the American healthcare system. My dad was a doctor; I went to the hospital to visit him once while in college and had to walk in through the ER and it was like walking off the streets of America (in Washington, DC no less) and into a Third World war zone. Alma and I aren’t getting any younger and neither are our moms — visits to the doctor and the ER are a matter of constant frustration.

Seeing the way that doctors and nurses can be under siege, caught between a rock (of patients in need) and a hard place (of a broken system) has been cathartic for us. But that’s nothing compared to what we were feeling while watching the latest episode.

If you don’t know already, a pair of ICE agents walked into the ER last week, escorted an injured detainee. My Black-ass stomach nearly wrenched out of my Black-ass body, and I can only imagine what my Mexican-American wife was feeling. The show didn’t shy away from the reality of things…emergency rooms are obliged to provide care to anyone, regardless of immigration status, but that doesn’t mean much to the Black and Brown people in the waiting room or employed by the hospital. People fled the hospital in droves, leaving issues untreated and the ER short-staffed.

Noah Wylie’s lead character, Dr. Robby, tries to make the best of a bad situation, explaining that there’s nothing they can do to address the detainee’s circumstance other than treat her injury and get her out of there quickly — but he eventually demands that the ICE agents stop making a spectacle of themselves because of the chaos and fear spreading in their wake. This, of course, is the match that lights their fuse.

The ICE agents roughly manhandle their injured detainee, and one of the nurses tries to intervene, they arrest him. The rest of the staff is left scrambling to figure out how they can possibly help…and there are no clear answers.

I can’t overstate how much effort I put into avoiding the news. The atrocities are so frequent that I’m barely affected by their reporting anymore — but this story on television settled into my heart and soul…just as great fiction is supposed to do. Don’t get me wrong, this had the added bonus of extreme timeliness and relatability; the fact that ICE agents have literally gotten away with murder just made the episode all the more heart-wrenching.

Do you all understand how much I needed this? I avoid the news, I keep everything going on at arm’s length. It’s hard to focus on making cartoons out of board games and setting up dynamic lighting on battlemaps when all you can think about is pedophiles going unpunished, so I try to turn a blind eye. This episode of The Pitt gave me a safe place to open my eyes again.

The Work

Well, the writing continues…and moreover, it’s kicking into a higher gear. I don’t necessarily have more paying work (although there are potential jobs on the horizon) but I have things that have to get done, some of which might lead to more work.

• There’s the short story for SYSTEMIC. I’ve been struggling with this but I’ve made myself a promise to finish a first draft this week. (EDIT: I finished this script a while ago. We have three out of the eight pages completely finished -- pencils, inks, colors, letters -- and the remaining pages have been pencilled already.)

  
  

• I need to get cracking on that novel. (EDIT: I started working on this, "in public" on my Substack, last week.)

  
  

• I have two pilots for which I wrote first drafts, both of which need and deserve rewrites. (I think the ideas are strong.) If I can get them to place where I like them, they can be good samples for my reps. (EDIT: My personal rep is reading one of them now.)

  
  

• I have an idea for an animated pilot that’s been scratching at the back of my head for a long time. I need to get it out. (EDIT: Yeah.)

  
  

• I have an idea that I love for a creator-owned comic book miniseries. My ideas don’t always skew toward the subversive, but this one definitely is. But it’s only an idea — I don’t have a story yet. (EDIT: Shit, I'm not even 100% sure what I was talking about here.)

  
  

• Lastly, I recently got a bug up my ass to reach out to some IP holders and see if they’d be interested in entering into a shopping agreement with me. I think I could adapt their work to the screen in some pretty fun ways. (EDIT: Yeah, this is a frustrating process. I've reached out...but I haven't really moved the needle.)

  
  

There’s a lot of stuff I need to get to — I’m honestly never at a loss for something to work on. I have new ideas all the time. But I’ve always said that ideas are a dime a dozen…it’s the work that matters. I need to do the work.

Speaking of Work

It’s hard out here, as you all probably know, and I need actual paying work. (With the exception of SYSTEMIC, everything in the above is just work on spec.) I mean, I’ve been applying for gigs writing about comics and movies — you’d think having written Fantastic Four For Dummies would be enough to at least get me an interview for something like that, but no luck.

If you or anyone you know is in need of something written or edited, I hope you’ll think of me!