un/magical

planting a tiny flag

So my one-month writing hiatus took a little longer than expected. The best laid plans (am I right). You might remember that I took this PDW break to focus on a project I’ve been working on for almost 3 years. Well last month I produced and acted in the pilot episode of a TV series I wrote. Over the course of 5 days, I managed a crew of 16 and 2 actors. I catered, insured, covid tested, craft serviced, petty cashed, union complied, and executive produced those 18 beautiful souls to the best of my ability. To say I learned a lot is a gross understatement.

The process was surprisingly unmagical. In hindsight, thinking that a week on set giving birth to my brainchild would be ‘magical’ was laughably naive. Shit is hard fucking work. In fact, it’s the hardest I’ve ever worked on anything ever. It’s sweat and grunge and long hours and fighting the elements and managing personalities and difficult decisions. It’s anxiety and uncertainty and pressure and stakes. And oodles and oodles of money. Those five days on set used up every single part of me. For a week afterward it felt like I had been wrung out. I slept like the dead.

Now that I’ve got some distance, I see that there was some magic in there. That magic - the real stuff - came from seeing people I hardly know offer up their talent, equipment, experience, labor, literal sweat, and creative input for a silly script I wrote. It was there when I watched one of my best friends, who’s a legit actor on a network TV show, offer up a performance full of detail and heart and virtuosity for practically no money. The magic was present when two friends, who I’ve only known a short time, gave over their entire house to a crew of 20 people for the week. There was certainly magic in watching a friend who randomly and mysteriously popped up in my life not that long ago, take my script, lovingly wrap her arms around it, and direct it into existence. Every time someone lent me a truck or loaned me a cooler or brought me donuts or sent a check-in text, I felt the magic.

Maybe another word for magic is love. Not the yummy kind but the real nitty gritty kind. For a week I was surrounded by folks who love what they do, so much so that they sacrifice hefty amounts of comfort and stability in order to do it. My own presence in the eye of that TV-making storm was certainly love. I love this story and the characters in it. I love collaborating and creating things with other people, something I haven’t done in a meaningful way in a very long time. I love this process so much that I continue making big sacrifices and shakily put one foot in front of the other without knowing what comes next. It’s a deep, scary, pulsating, unsexy kinda love - the type that seeps out from the marrow.

It was a bizarre feeling to be surrounded by this kind of love while the world around us continued to dismantle itself. We saw the 3rd-worst school shooting in US history in Uvalde. The supreme court overturned Roe. Putin continued his vanity war in Ukraine. Death. Destruction. Demise. All rooted in lovelessness, an absence of magic.

So while it seemed laughably useless to be making a drunken-hilarity-boob-joke-filled TV show, creating something out of nitty gritty love was the only thing that made any real sense. In a world that appears to have abandoned all magic, making things and loving things is an act of restoration, of rebellion, of mercy. It’s a way to help balance the scales of wreckage and rage. It’s planting the tiniest flag in the tiniest pocket of the world and declaring this is a place for magic, this is a place for love.

Maybe it’s corny and cliche but I really believe in the power of this. I’ve witnessed its power. I know the world can be a more livable, harmonious place if every one of us were to plant our little flags of magic and steadily walk forward into the unknown. If nothing else, it’s a vastly more enjoyable way to pass the time.

As for the show, I’m so proud of where it’s at and how it’s developing. I’m honored to be making it with such incredible folks. Over the next few months, my fellow magicians and I will continue editing it. We’ll have a little flag of our own, a proclamation of love, to plant in the earth. What happens after that? Who’s to say. But I do know this tiny act of restoration, of rebellion, of mercy has been one of the wilder rides I’ve taken.