The Hollywood Tooth

I was at the endodontist's office to check the status of a tooth that the doctor had repaired about nine months ago. It's impossible to evaluate the tooth visually, as the problematic area is inside the bones of my mouth; I don't have any symptoms, either, so an x-ray is necessary. So the doctor took an x-ray of my tooth, told me nothing had changed, and asked me to return in a year. She told me we won't know for a full year whether the tooth is healing properly - that's how slowly a tooth heals. So even if I were able to see the affected area (which I can't), I would still be unable to see any progress due to the glacial rate of change. And the first thing that popped into my head was: this tooth is an excellent allegory for Hollywood.

Pillow Crisis is on hiatus. We sent the treatment off to our contacts a few weeks ago, and proceeded to hear absolutely nothing from them. A week passed. Then another. Then another. Huili went through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I leveled up my characters in Final Fantasy Tactics. Another week passed. Finally, we decided to reinitiate contact: even if our contacts hated the thing, it would still be valuable to get the studio notes for use as a calibration tool.

Out contacts returned the message. They were really busy, and still hadn't read the entire treatment. However, they liked what they read a lot. I'm inclined to believe in the sincerity of the liking, but sincere liking is not exactly a primal motivation in this industry.

So we continue to wait. My career, like those of many others, is an extremely stable mixture of waiting and non-committal liking which may or may not precipitate into action.

In the meantime, I'm on to my next writing project: Lobsters vs. Butterflies. My intention is to finish this script within six months, which is an utterly laughable ambition, given my project history. But LvB has a simplicity and an energy that my other projects lacked, and I have a pretty good feeling that nine months is wholly doable. This was supposed to be my "easy" project, but if there's one thing I've learned from myself and other artists, it's this: there is never any such thing as an easy project. There will always be unforeseen difficulties. Already, LvB is requiring more research than I had anticipated, which implies a graduate student-like existence for myself. Admittedly, my graduate school is located in California and has very low graduation requirements, but still.