On dreams that don’t come true, stories that don’t sell, and the quiet possibility that they still matter more than we know.

I was driving home from yet another doctor’s visit, the kind where you walk in with a little pocket of hope and walk out with it completely flattened, like a penny on a railroad track.

This had been the latest in a string of attempts to fix what’s been broken in me for a while now. And as I sat in traffic with the radio off and my thoughts on loud, they drifted – not toward my next appointment or the next new medication – but toward a story. The story of a story that I thought was the high watermark of all the stories I’ve written. So, if that wasn’t good enough to get some traction, what was the point, now that it seems unlikely I’d be able to muster up the mojo and creative juices to try again. Game over? I thought I was just getting started.

The story started as a dream – literally. The kind of story that felt gifted to me, like it floated down on a breeze and landed squarely in my lap with a note attached which reads in a voice right out of the magical cornfield in Iowa: Don’t squander this.

Short version: I did my best not to squander it. Gave it everything I had. And again… nothing.

What was the point of this?

At that point, I started asking a question that anyone who’s ever followed a calling into a deadend knows too well: What was the point of this? If no one ever sees it, or if the curtain never rises—was it all just a divine false start?

And then, somewhere between the traffic lights and the rising doubt, a quiet thought found its way through:

What if this story was meant for just one audience,
and that audience was me?

Mic-drop moment. Maybe some of the creative projects we give our heart to aren’t necessarily meant to be “shared” on a screen or on the stage in the traditional sense – but are instead a way that divine inspiration flows to us for a purpose TBD. Maybe they’re not a story we’re meant to deliver, but a story we’re meant to receive in a medium that we can understand – a story.

So I started wondering—what was this story meant to teach me?

Imagine this next bit in black-and-white, maybe with some soft vignetting around the frame to make it clear this is a flashback.

The Great Reject

It wasn’t even a noble project. Not a war drama. Not even a plucky indie with a ukulele soundtrack. It was a popcorn movie about the kidnapping of the G7 that you may have heard me whine about previously on these pages, and did I have to open that old wound again in this post? Apparently so, because when the final door slammed shut (and locked itself from the inside) on G7, I did what any normal adult with a large stack of unsuccessful scripts would do.

I quit.

Not just the project. Not just Hollywood. I quit writing altogether. Who needs this kind of rejection in their lives – wasn’t that what high school was for? I dropped my pen like it was leaking Bic blue ink in the pocket of my good white shirt and walked away.

And for a while – an entire calendar year – I wrote absolutely nothing.

Now, I wish I could tell you that my “non-writing era” was liberating. That I filled my days with yoga, woodworking, or long walks through the trails in Glenoaks Canyon humming James Taylor tunes. But alas. It turns out that when you deny the part of you that is its own therapy and makes you feel alive, what you’re left with is … well, something closer to “meh.”

… we cracked open our souls like the drawer
of ancient mysteries in the kitchen.

My wife – who has the uncanny ability to sense a storm coming long before the clouds show up – picked up on the shift. One look at me staring blankly into my soggy Wheat Chex, and she knew something was off. So we arranged a quick escape. Our girls went to stay with their grandparents, and we retreated to the beachside condo of my cousin (the legitimate screenwriter in the family), in San Clemente.

There, amid the sea breeze and seagulls, we cracked open our souls like the drawer of ancient mysteries in the kitchen. We did one of those self-inventory exercises where you write down what matters most to you and see where you may have drifted off-course. I’d always thought those exercises were mostly good for folks going through a midlife crisis or looking to cash out and buy a Winnebago and touch all 50 states. But turns out, it’s good for regular folks, too – especially the creatively blocked without Winnebago-sized piles of cash laying about.

What surfaced was this: I still loved writing. It was my therapy. My way of processing. But I just couldn’t keep doing it the same way – endlessly chasing Hollywood’s validation like a cat with boundary issues.

If I was going to write again, it had to be with different expectations of what I would get out of it. No more “breaking in.” Just breaking through to myself. If something came of it – fine. If not, cool, it would be my hobby. Some people knit. Some people whittle. I would write stories that mattered to me.

And just like that, a funny thing happened. I felt…aligned. Like my soul had finally been to the mechanic and gotten its tires rotated. But what to write? I had no idea. I’d landed in the writer’s doldrums.

Then Came the Dream

Now, I am not a dream guy. I forget mine almost instantly – usually before a foot touches down. But this one stuck. It featured a house full of odd men in protective gear from different sports, all sitting in a circle in a front room just outside a baseball stadium I later would work out was Wrigley Field in Chicago.

One man was standing and talking to the group about something when the crack of a bat silenced the room. A few of them jumped up and ran outside to chase down the ball. But one man—too frail to move—just closed his eyes and listened. After a moment, he wheezed, “Four eighty-four,” and then…well, he died. Oh yeah – spoiler.

Apparently, this man had spent enough time in the home listening to home runs to calculate distance by sound alone. Nifty party trick. Poor timing, though.

I woke up thinking, “That was weird.” But the images lingered. And over the next few weeks, that strange little dream grew into something more. A screenplay. Meet the Home Run Club.

… over the next few weeks, that strange little dream grew into something more. A screenplay. Meet the Home Run Club.

The group members, while facing their terminal illnesses (rounding third, heading for home), choose to face their condition not with seeing how many things they could check off their bucket list, but by doing nice things anonymously for others – in between efforts to track down home run balls. Surprise, it turns out to be good medicine not just for the soul, but for the body as well.

It had heart. It had baseball. It had purpose. All the major food groups, but probably a bit too sentimental for Hollywood land. But that’s OK under my newly adopted rules. Still, it can’t hurt to try, right? I queried it to a few places and, against all odds, a clearly brilliant development exec named Maryann at Penny Marshall’s Parkway Productions pulled mine from the slush pile. Penny (RIP) had directed A League of Their Own. I realized Penny might not be itching to do another baseball movie with heart, but you grasp at whatever you can when you query.

Soon I was giving my name to the guard at the Universal Studios gate, then walking the hallowed streets of the back lot like I was somebody. I was doing my best to look like I belonged while rubber-necking through the giant studio doors as I walked by. A few minutes later I was sitting on a balcony in a sunny courtyard talking about story beats with a real-deal Hollywood exec. Like you do.

Maryann had some notes. Some were solid. Others were more … grim. She wanted darker. Edgier. Something with a little more bite and a little less charm. Over the next week or so, I did my best to find somewhere in the middle we could meet. I sent off a new draft, but while I was waiting for response, I discovered the studio pulled the rug. Parkway’s deal with Sony expired. Maryann was let go. Home Run Club was left without a home. It was an orphan.

Now, here’s the odd thing: I was bummed, but wasn’t devastated. Not like with G7.

Because this time, the story was still in alignment with my soul, and that counted for something. How exactly? Well, that’s a question that remained unasked for a couple of decades.

Back to full color – misty flashback over. Still just me on the drive home wondering if I had received the message being sent my way via this project, since apparently, it wasn’t for an audience.

Then came the call.

To be continued. Only so much typing these fingers can manage.