I don’t know what day this is of the quarantine. I know there won’t be enough of them for me. I like this. I write a lot. Maybe not here for you to read, but I am writing. A lot.
A few years ago I started writing a screenplay inspired by, if not actually about, my dear friend (girl) Charlie. She is one of the most impressive human beings I have ever met. She is the type of woman human we hope all of our daughters children become.
Like all wannabe writers, I got stuck and put it down. It has been sitting on my Mac for years now.
This is where you hope I tell you I have gotten back to writing that screenplay. I have not.
What I have done is enlisted my good friend (boy) Charlie to write a thing or three. Screenplays.
Fun story: a few years ago I had a crazy dream about a trucker who gets accused of murder based on cell phone forensics. Turned out a few college kids invented an app that clones other phones and their digital signature. They used it to lure women, kill them, then frame whomever was nearest via the cloning app. It was a strange, nonsensical dream and at 5 AM I wrote it all out in a text and sent it to Charlie suggesting we turn it into a screenplay. I was half asleep. When I woke up for realsies a few hours later I was filled with dread at what I had texted Charlie.
I’m paraphrasing, but Charlie said, “let’s flesh it out and write it.”
Again, you are expecting me to tell you that we are writing it. We are not. I forgot most of the dream and lost the text I sent. I never actually got off my ass and wrote anything other than that text.
But before the quarantine I texted Charlie and said, ‘let’s write a screenplay.’ He said yes. So I went to New Orleans for a weekend and we wrote. And fought. And wrote some more.
And then this end of the world shit happened.
It’s an amazing motivator, the end of the world.
As soon as I post this I will get back to working on the third draft of our first script while Charlie deconstructs and tries to make sense of the scattershot of a rough draft I have created for our second script. Somewhere else is a blurb or two of an idea for still a third script.
Why am I telling you this? Fuck if I know. I’m an insecure prick who needs validation from strangers on the internet? Probably.
But also, the seven or eight of you have been along for the ride so far and I feel I owe it to you to let you in on the next adventure. If I can, I will convince Charlie to do a podcast and a website to, I dunno, follow along with this (mis)adventure of ours.
God knows that it’s more than likely our screenplays will end up in a pile of forgotten scripts along with tens of thousands of others.
But then again, who knows?
Copyright 2022 Rudy Martinez
