Can't produce plays without checky!

My agent received a check today. This is not earth-shattering by itself – she’s a good agent and has a working stable of clients, so she hardly has to dust any equipment off when it comes time to deduct her ten percent and send a new check out the door to the lucky writer.

It’s just that today, the lucky writer is me.

It’s not the amount I’m over the moon about – once I’ve paid the necessary commissions and set aside a chunk for taxes, the cash in hand I’ll end up with won’t be much more than my last paycheck from that mystery job I haven’t told you about yet. It won’t shatter my debt picture and it won’t get me a fabulous new set of teeth.

But, purely conceptually, this is huge. I haven’t seen a paycheck from writing for the movie industry in something like two years. It’s not like I can go film whiskey ads in Japan when the work is slow. And if this project keeps moving forward – the director has moved mountains so far and looks to keep doing so – there’s bigger checks ahead. We’ll get excited about that later. But today, I got a boot up the ass from a thug named “Affirmation”, and it feels damned good.

It will feel better when the check actually arrives. Onward Postal Service, EXCELSIOR!