PART TWO: Fear of a Trek Planet (1)

So.

If you know me you know that, in addition to the talking, I also love some other things. One of them is STAR TREK.

Yeah. I see that smirk. Drop it.

If you're reading this, you exist somewhere on the geek hierachy and, brothers and sisters, you'll be gratified to know that yours truly lives at the apex of that chart.

<-------take a look.

A dubious distinction? Perhaps. But, again, if you're reading this, you have to know on some level how much Star Trek has influenced your lives.

Cell phones? Star Trek. Tasers? Star Trek. Computers in your house, in your purse, on your wrist? Star Trek, baby. Star effing Trek. Don't beleive me? Go to the inventors. They all cite Star Trek as one of the prime movers in either their design, desire to design or desire to enter technology as their vocation.

What does all that have to do with this? Read on. We'll get back to it soon enough.

I don't just write comics. I write pretty much everything , even the occassional song. I have stories and plays and novels and screenplays and poems and, of course, blogs out there being submitted for someone's approval pretty much all the time. But, like the other 500 million guys like me who come to Los Angeles to make that dream real, I was moving uphill at a reasonable but reasonably slow pace.

Meeting after meeting. Smile after smile. Office after office. With not as much to show ofr my troubles as one might expect given the level of compliment being heaped. (Don't get me started on the whole animation thing or we'll be here all month.)

It's a grind, is the point. A marathon rather than a sprint.

Especially when you have to pursue the writing while at the same time maintaining the Real World job that pays your rent. Some days it's wicked hard to keep up that crazed sense of optimism I'm so famous for. On those days, I might feel a need to vent. Said venting happens in one of two places.

One is @home to my wife or, as I like to call it, Time Out For Life Coaching.

The other is to my freinds and fellow morituri at my Local Comic Shop (LCS).

I was was exercising option #2 one day after a particularly disheartening meeting about That Script Everyone Loves But Nobody Wants To Make when a voice behind me said, "Dude, YOU'RE a writer?"

(Why he said that and why he said it that way is a story for another time and that time is never.)

I turned around and who should I be looking at but the man who would eventually be bringing you THE RED LINE, Robert Burnett.

"Yeah. I'm a writer. In theory," I told him.

"Well, like, what have you written?"

Now, honestly, he got a little glazey when I started talking about the screenplays galore stacking up at my home. Remember: there are 500 million guys just like me in L.A.. Everlast's Guy @ the Liquor Store Begging for Your Change has a screenplay in his shopping cart. And so does his dog. The dog's may even be better. I've heard good things.

However, when I mentioned having had stories published in several STAR TREK anthologies, his eyes lit right up. If you don't know anything about Mr. Robert Meyer Burnett, know this: he is Star Trek Fan Number One.

Whatever you think you know, you don't. Whatever devotion you think you have, it pales in the supernova intensity of Rob's. Some people dress up. Some people go to conventions. Robert Burnett took all his money and that of several other people and made a motion picture that is part spoof, part love letter, part American Graffiti, called FREE ENTERPRISE. Not a fan film. Not a continuation of one of the cancelled TV shows with fans taking over for Patrick Stewart or William Shatner. A legitimate romantic comedy released by a real major motion picture company. Go rent it. Go buy it. Bow down.

"You know I have every Star Trek novel ever published," he said. Not bragging. Not challenging. Just letting me know the facts. Because, if I was bluffing, if I hadn't actually written the Trek stories, he was in a perfect position to go see for himself.

But I wasn't bluffing. I don't bluff. I lack the guile gene.

The next time I saw him, weeks later, he was yelling at me from half a block away.

"Dude! I can't beleive you wrote those stories!"

"I told you I wrote them."

"Yeah, but, I mean, I can't believe YOU wrote those stories."

(Why he said that is also a long story that has nothing to do with this. Move along.)

Before I can say anything else, he's shoving a business card in my hand and telling me we have to talk. At his office. ASAP.

continued in PART THREE