Happy Saturday!

Can you tell that I am back in the swing of things now that I have a regular schedule. Summers are not good for a creature of habit such as myself, as I get off track and then rarely want to accomplish something. I spent the summer trying to figure out what to do from a creative perspective and came up with absolutely nothing. But now that I’m back in a groove, it’s a little bit easier to get things done and figure out the patterns for how to be a creative human being.

This week, both of my daughters had birthdays. It’s a weird feeling when your kids are out of the nest and earning their own way in the world. We talk to both of them almost every day and I thank the technology gods that enable us to have conversations, face to face, when we are literally on three different sides of the planet. This morning, we chatted with one of us in Florida, one of us in China, and two of us in Abu Dhabi. To be able to see their faces, even if only for a little bit, makes my life so much happier, and both of our daughters should realize that they mean the world to us. I’m sure they do.

Booth is currently in government-approval limbo. In order to get financing to make the film, the company that is putting up the money wants rebates from the government in order to get things going. For that to happen, we have to get approval by the Creative Media Authority here in the country, as well as the National Media Authority. We have approval for one, but are still waiting on the other. If the approval happens, then we are off and running and will get something made. If it doesn’t, then it’s back to the drawing board.

In the meantime, I have to occupy myself. A few years ago, I started a screenplay called Ideaspace. It’s basically a story about a young adult who has lost her father, but is lost herself in life. So after his death, she returns to the family home and starts looking through her father’s old journals to see what he’s written. What she discovers is a world of ideas that her father created over the years, with each one representing different aspects of his life.

This stems from my own practice of trying to write an “Idea of the Day” in my journals. It’s an attempt for me to be creative even when there’s no reason to be creative. I have, literally, thousands of these entries in my journals and I have never known what to do with them. Sometimes, they flourish into bigger ideas. My Boyd McCloyd books came from these idea journals, as did Booth, and pretty much everything else that I’ve ever written.

But there are plenty of good ideas in there that will never get written, great concepts for movies and characters and businesses that will never see the light of day. As I thought about things like this…all these ideas lost to time, buried in my journals…I thought about how I could take some of them and show the world what they were. I thought about this for years.

Ideaspace was the answer.

At first, I was going to write a movie about a guy sitting down to write. It was just going to be him sitting on a couch, trying to think of things to put on paper. And then, on screen, we would see all of those ideas appear through the movie, some good, some bad. But there was never really any story there for that to be any good. In order to show all of these ideas, I needed a story; some sort of concept that tied everything together.

Eventually, I settled on the story of Josie, the daughter I mentioned before, and how she discovers her dad’s journals. My goal was to write it out, using my old journals and old ideas as fodder for what she reads. I started writing the screenplay in 2024 and eventually stopped, because life got in the way. I wrote another book, did a few other projects, and tried to finish some other things. But the idea was still there and I knew it was a decent idea.

Two days ago, I sat down to re-read the original screenplay. Lo and behold, it’s pretty good. I’ve got about 70 pages of the script, but with no ending. That’s something I’m going to work on over the next few weeks.

But then, what do I do with it? It’s not the kind of screenplay that anyone would really want to make. It’s odd and has a circular plot that really doesn’t follow a traditional story structure. Plus, it’s all over the place.

My original goal when I started writing it was to make it myself. I told myself that I would give myself five years to finish it and that I could film bits and pieces over the years to put it together. I could spend a week filming a one-minute sequence where the dad’s idea for a zombie movie is written. I could spend another week filming a sequence where the father writes an idea for a fantasy movie. I would spend that time trying to create these things on my own in an attempt to eventually have a finished movie that I could tie together into something bigger. That was the idea two years ago, but I knew that, realistically, I would never be able to get it done.

But then along comes AI.

Right now, I am able to do things all by myself that I never would have been able to do two years ago. All of those worlds that I wanted to create for my movie, I can do them. All of the fantastic visions in my head, I can create. In the script, I have the nineteen year old version of the father talking to the fifty-four year old version of the father. I can actually do that now.

The notion of making a movie entirely by myself, using AI to augment it, is something that is incredibly intriguing to me.

But who knows? I have to finish the script first. Any thoughts?