Good Things Come To Those Who Wait: On Half-Past Eight PM (Part Three)

A few years after the video version of Half-Past was made, I was in a different place in life. I had finished the two-year Journalism course I took after high school and, after deciding I didn't want to be a journalist, enrolled at University of Toronto for a highly useful, very worthwhile Bachelors program in English Lit. I was growing out of my self-imposed outcast ways, nearly as likely to go out for drinks or board game nights with friends as I was to be sitting in front of my computer on a Friday night.

Early in my second year there, I was standing in line for a Metropass when I saw a flyer advertising open submissions to the Victoria College Drama Festival, encouraging student-writers to get in on it. A lightbulb went on over my head. I had, after all, written the greatest, funniest, most original one-act play in history, Half-Past Eight PM. Surely the people in charge of this festival will be salivating for my inclusion once I submit my 20-pages of genius.

With a Lot of Help From My Friends: On Half-Past Eight PM (Part Two)

Are you ready for more self-mythologizing? Here's what happened next in the saga of Half-Past Eight PM...

A lot happened in the next school year after my success with Half-Past. My friend Ana, who had transferred to Catholic School for personal reasons, transferred back and asked me to write a movie script for her to direct, but was sadly never produced. Josh and I collaborated on a 30-minute film for CommTech where we played hired killers. And I appeared onstage for the first time outside the drama room in the cast of the Grade 12 production of The Importance of Being Earnest... as the main character's butler.

Over the course of that year I became closer with those drama kids I had been orbiting. Only my paralyzing shyness kept me from auditioning for that year's Sears Festival production of Twelve Angry Men, one of my bigger regrets in a high school career comprised mostly of regrettable moments. But I did become part of that group anyway, making friends without having to be a joiner, just as I always wanted. In the final months of high school it kind of finally felt like I belonged somewhere. My personality had taken three and a half years to bake, and I was very close to shedding the pervasive feeling that they didn't really actually like me. I just wished I had more time to enjoy it.

A Strange Form of Revenge: On Half-Past Eight PM (Part One)

As someone who is prone to nostalgia but optimistically suspects his best years still lie ahead I have a tricky relationship with successes of the past, even as moderate as they may be. While putting on a reasonably successful local theatre theater production is a pretty low bar for greatness it remains the thing I have done in life that was seen and enjoyed by the most people. So since this is the blog about me, please indulge the part of me that is a legend in my own mind. Here's a little reflection on the 15th - and 10th and 13th - anniversary of Half-Past Eight PM.

It began as revenge. A very specific, strange form of revenge. The kind where the people you're getting revenge on aren't even there to know it.

Stuff I Did: "Entrepreneurial Studies"

When I was in Grade 11, which is what Canadians call the eleventh grade, I was at the point in High School where they really let you start determining your path by choosing various electives that might prepare you for the real world, or prepare you for something that might prepare you for the real world. I was a bright young man seemingly with a great future ahead of me, so I did what anyone would do in my situation: I chose a path that offered almost no challenges and little of value. Ancient Civilizations? Philosophy? Drama?? I was clearly just picking classes I thought would be fun, and to be honest, they were, and as a result it only took me an extra decade to get my first job with a desk.

For whatever reason, I ended up taking a class on Entrepreneurial studies. At the time, I didn't foresee myself working for "the man." I envisioned going into business for myself, monetizing my passion for self-produced comics and becoming the iconoclastic creative genius I always assumed I really was.  Actually, I can only assume this was the thought process in selecting this class, because it may or may not have seemed like a validation of my concept of myself as a future struggling, starving, self-employed creative writer scrounging from job to job. It's not like I figured I would open a muffler shop.

The class ended up being one of the most frustrating courses I ever took in school. The daily course mostly involved watching a series of videos called "Entrepreneurship For Canadians" hosted by a sketch comic named Peter Wildman, who was part of a now-ancient and forgotten Canadian troupe called The Frantics. I remember zero-all about the content of these videos, which mostly profiled small business owners and probably highlighted legal and bureaucratic matters they faced, except for the creeping realization that Wildman had performed the voice of the villainous Mojo in the 1990's X-Men cartoon.

Pictured: Entrepreneurship, actually

A lot of my friends were in the class and once it became clear that the teacher, an aged biddy named Ms. Irvine, had little interest in actually performing the act of education more than once or twice a month, we gave up whatever hope we had of learning anything about becoming successful entrepreneurs and goofed off, slagging out of class to execute raids on the third-floor supply office to steal pens.

The final presentation was to create a mock business-plan. Irvine had alerted us that we could pick any business we wanted, but strongly advised against picking a restaurant because they had too many extra moving parts. My friend Doug, then an aspiring actor, who was my partner for this project, had his heart set on owning a little nightclub that featured standup comedy. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it wasn't real, and went along. We barely passed with a 55. Maybe someone could have overcome the prohibitive logistics of owning a restaurant - people actually do that, you know - but not someone who spent the entire semester yukking it up about Peter Wildman's dad jeans.

Between videos, Irvine often presented us with clippings from the business section that were vaguely pertinent to businesses and business owners, but again, reeked of just scrambling to fill time. It was there that I learned that Justin Timberlake had signed on to be the face of McDonald's' new advertising campaign, "I'm Lovin' It," for which he had composed the signature song - a catchphrase which has somehow managed to survive for a decade and a half!

It was also in Entrepreneurial Studies that I first encountered, in a seemingly completely innocuous way, one of the great evils of our times. It was during this time that renowned owner of businesses Donald Trump had signed a deal to produce, and star in, a reality TV competition show that involved him picking a potential new employee for one of his businesses. At the time I was only vaguely aware that Donald Trump was a rich person, well known for being rich, and that had something to do with real estate, or some shit. I had no idea that fifteen years later he would have the entire world in his withering, orange talon, all because he got extra-famous on TV for yelling at people, which made certain people see qualities of leadership and moral guidance in him, somehow.

There's a lesson in here, somewhere, about the importance of education... not necessarily for yourself, but for the world at large. You know, I don't regret the shit I went to school for and tried to learn. I don't regret that it didn't lead directly to me being gainfully employed and enjoying a meteoric success, or that I never started my own business, whose pitfalls I was able to navigate thanks to my deft studying of Entrepreneurship in high school. None of it kept me from landing in a modest occupation on the wrong side of the publishing industry I dreamed of contributing to. But I don't regret any of it because any education I received, at any level, in ant institution or on my own time, has been in the service of making me a compassionate, curious individual who values only what's best for our world and the people who live on it - and that I fucking hate Nazis.

Keep on Rockin'
-Scotto

Stuff I Did: MELANCHOLY

ok it’s friday night and i am lonely, tell me about the novels you planned (and maybe even wrote) when you were a teenager

— ☕️ charlotte geater 🥞 (@tambourine) April 20, 2018

Lately I've been sleeping a little fitfully, so I saw this tweet early this morning at 4:30 AM. Although I don't always feel compelled to look at my phone, I do often find it calms my mind down to have some #content to #consume.

My response was that I couldn't tweet mine, per se, because in my delirious state, having had it jarred from the recess of my mind, I thought maybe I had made a breakthrough that would crack this thing wide open just yet, and I supposed that the thread would imply that the ideas we have when we're teenagers are juvenile and that mostly respondents would have given up on them by now. (A sampling of the responses to these novels were actually quite supportive.)

Although I've always wanted to be a writer, I never had an idea for a novel until I was in my last year of high school. By that time I had written a fair amount of output: beyond school assignments like drama presentations and the 30-minute short film I did for CommTech, I had written a one-act play for the school's Fringe Festival, a feature-length screenplay that I sold to an aspiring filmmaker friend, and co-written and drawn 12 issues of my own webcomic. Some of this was very good for a 17-year-old, some not so much. My point is that I had output.

The idea struck me in the middle of a Writer's Craft class presentation on allegory. I started to envision "the saddest girl in the world" leaving her hometown and searching for her long-lost brother. Eventually she uncovers a scheme to control minds with pharmaceuticals. There are a few other key bits of quirk I am omitting here for succinctness and because, as I said, I haven't let go of it yet. But the idea that a 17-year-old could accurately and bitingly diagnose and resolve all of society's ills is something only that 17-year-old could think.

Like many of the responses to that tweet, this was to be my first NaNoWriMo attempt, and despite being in my first year of a college course in Journalism by that time (or perhaps because it was only my first year, in a college journalism course,) I did in fact reach the goal of 50,000 words, coming within maybe 10,000 words of an organic ending to the story.

Time passed, my computer crashed, all that work was lost, although I could recount virtually the entire plot outline I had set out when I was 17-18. Every once in a while, when I felt I had leveled up in prose, I would take a stab at my dream opening chapters, where we meet the narrator - not the "saddest girl in the world," whose name was Melancholy (again, I was 17,) Mel for short, but her male friend Eli, to whom she relates her adventures. My premise was that I could never actually get inside Mel's mind, and somedegree of distance was needed. Plus for all that quirk I planned on including, I could put in a sort of "Big Fish" device where you're never quite sure if what Mel had told Eli is the literal truth.

Earlier in this decade I made a very brave stab at trying this again and to a point I was pleased with the results. I got to maybe 35,000 or 40,000 words over the course of a year or two (no more NaNoWriMos for me, life always gets in the way) when the ending that I had envisioned started coming unglued because while I could get from point A to point B to point C - the parts that I had long envisioned and ruminated on from my teen years - points X, Y and Z were a little more of a stretch. The concept of medications brainwashing people felt more rancid as I learned ore and more about the stigma of seeking help for one's mental illnesses, and the theme was transmuted more into TeleComm, somewhat awkwardly. Moreover, I had invented some new ideas to play with that turned Mel into a secondary character in her own story.

In the time since I last put it down, I actually started dating a woman named Mel, which makes it a little awkward to use that as the name of my character - but as a writer you tend to get attached to things like these, so she continues to live in my mind as Mel(ancholy.)

In the light of day, my "breakthrough," feels less like a breakthrough, but just something to play with. I have spent a lot of time grappling with not only my intended Mind-Blowing Social Commentary (I'd settle for a making a few noteworthy observations, but it's hard to tamp down that teenage ambition) but also pondering whatever right I have to slip into the skin of a female character and push my intended "the princess saves herself in this one" narrative, and what responsibilities I have in doing so. As a dude writer, in 2018, you have to be aware of how much your natural inclinations may reinforce played-out tropes, and whether you are up to doing the extra legwork to avert or subvert them should you decide to do so.

I want this to be a smart, funny, surprising book, in the event that I ever finally finish writing it.
 I want it to live up to the potential of being a story about a smart, unique young lady coming to terms with her flaws and meeting her potential, all on her own, without necessarily defining success as "winning a guy." If she is indeed to be the "saddest girl in the world" (a premise I have played down as I've matured) I want to end by determining what place that sadness holds in our life - that it can liberate us as well as hurt us, as long as we are not controlled by it.

I may not have time in the near future to revisit the world I had created for her, but Mel, or whatever name she has in the future, continues to live in my mind, as real as any actual person I know. Realer than most, honestly.