Forgive my long response. Cue the violin.
I have to give a bit of background to explain what I'm going to do with the manuscript and why. I have a stack of scripts that is higher than my knees- and I'm 5'9ish- that I have tried to push for years to no avail. Five of them are 'feature length' films, ~22 are pilots for television shows and 12 are episodes of a dark comedy television show called Shmyle for Tyranny. A little over four years ago , a
PR firm that was pushing Nashville film projects picked up on my work and had me do a spec job for a sitcom based on a book written in regards to quotes from men.
The book had been self published but was eventully picked up by a publisher and sales increased to a point where a show became obvious; the script was polished and pitched to a b*** at ABC and changed about 10-11 times before she finally decided that she liked it. Three weeks later the
PR firm was told that ABC was passing on the rights to the book (meaning they'd have to change the name of the show) but liked the script, causing the author to declare that since the script was written with characters whose psychological makeups had been influenced by her book (I never even read her book, but there was some sort of legal tie between the two projects), she owned the right to the script and the book. After two or three months of legal squabbles, ABC decided they wanted nothing to do with the author or the script so it was tossed. I was the sole writer listed as well as co-creator- simply seeing pilot filmed would have brought me tremendous satisfaction. Anyway, this is the story of my life. I have stories upon stories of situations like this- like when John Agar (Sands of Iwo Jima, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) agreed in principle to attach himself to one of my scripts which, in my opinion, would have taken him back to respectability (some of his late movies were questionable). He died less than four months later.
As I mentioned, I wrote an entire 12 episode Britcom and sent the pilot to the BBC's Writer's Room. The script was returned with a form rejection letter; the returned package is still sitting in the same place in the study where I launched it after realizing that I'd sent 32 pieces of paper across the friggin' Atlantic Ocean only to have it returned unread.
I have many more that I won't bore you with. I'm getting to a point somewhere. Bare whip me.
I've been writing solidly for thirteen years now and everyone has always said how they have something definite . . . may be able to pass it to so-and-so . . . know an agent who can work with me . . . have a brother working for CAA. After a while I decided nothing was going to happen with any of it, so I started editing it even more and going through work I'd thought was finished years earlier. I ended up working for the
PR firm as their head of marketing and content creation. In the last 18 months I decided that I wanted to do what I want to do, something challenging . . . creative work that's not selling a dozen different companies or products but rather working to build a global brand. That required throttling back on the
PR work as I search for the right company to join. In the meantime, I picked back up on the book based on three scripts which were based on some true events and a lot of BS. I had never finished a book before (writing, not reading )and so have resolved myself to finishing it to a point where I would feel comfortable allowing another human to read it. However, reaching that point is no guarantee that I will actually allow anyone else to sneak a peek.
In short, I have quit writing with the idea of making money (and being published) in mind and begun to simply tell the stories I have to tell in whatever form they wish. In that light, my work will probably stay on the shelf until I die . . . perhaps one day the mass of paper will make its way out into the world, ending up on the doorstep of someone who has thousands of dead fish to wrap, finally serving a purpose.