Disney’s Berry Farm

Anybody that knows us knows that my wife and I are pretty big Disney fans.  We’ve had Disneyland Annual Passports for nearly a decade, we collect Disney memorabilia, we spent nearly the entirety of our two-week honeymoon at Walt Disney World.  We spend a lot of time at the parks in California and I consider us to be pretty knowledgeable about the history of Disney in the Los Angeles/Orange County area.  Disneyland and Disney California Adventure have become mainstays of entertainment in the area that people from all over the globe travel to.  It’s arguable that Disney made Anaheim what it is today.  (Ironically, one of the original proposed sites for Disneyland was my hometown of La Mirada, about twenty minutes northwest, but that obviously fell through.)  But most from outside the area don’t realize the local competition that Disney has had and the partnerships that have almost risen out of it.

Southern California is home to many attractions outside of Disneyland and Disney California Adventure.  Also in Anaheim, there’s the homes of the Angels and Ducks.  Out in the Riverside and San Bernardino areas, you’ve got Castle Park, Raging Waters, Splash Kingdom, and Wet’n’Wild.  Down in San Diego, you’ve got the world-famous San Diego Zoo and Safari Park, SeaWorld, Aquatica, Belmont Park, Legoland, the San Diego Convention Center, which hosts Comic-Con International every summer, and the stadiums that play home to the Padres and Chargers.  Then, of course, there’s L.A.  L.A.’s got Hollywood and a ton of world-famous museums, not to mention Universal Studios, Pacific Park, the Los Angeles Zoo, the Dodgers, the Kings, the Lakers, the Clippers, the Galaxy, and, just a little bit up the 5 freeway, Six Flags’ Magic Mountain and Hurricane Harbor.  But Disneyland’s closest rival is about five minutes away, in Buena Park.

The entrance to Kingdom of the Dinosaurs.

Knott’s Berry Farm‘s always been special to me.  Both my parents worked there out of high school.  It’s where they met.  I’ve had an aunt and a couple uncles work there, too.  But my dad worked there for basically my entire childhood.  We were spoiled by it.  On summer vacation, we went nearly every week on my dad’s day off.  We spent lots of birthdays there and there were several times that the entire family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, would all go and spend the day.  I was kind of a wuss when I was a kid and didn’t really like any rides with a drop, so I didn’t appreciate stuff like Boomerang, Montezuma’s Revenge, and the Timber Mountain Log Ride until I was a bit older.  The one ride that I loved, however, was the Kingdom of the Dinosaurs.

Postcard depicting the interior of Kingdom of the Dinosaurs.

It was a constantly in motion dark ride that took you on a time machine through pre-history.  I was a kid that loved dinosaurs and, though I’d probably think that it was totally fake now, it was amazing.  I mean, I knew they were just animatronics, but it was still rad to see tyrannosaurs and triceratops up-close-and-personal.  Even as I got older and eventually came to love the thrill of hurtling through the air on big roller coasters, Kingdom was still my favorite.  As I entered high school, my dad took another job and I hardly ever went to Knott’s anymore.

For the unfamiliar, Knott’s Berry Farm started out, not as an amusement park, but as an actual berry farm.  In 1920, Walter

A 1950s-era advertisement for Knott’s Berry Farm.

and Cordelia Knott set up a stand to sell berries, preserves, and pie from.  Once Highway 39 (known as Beach Boulevard today) was established next to the property in 1934, the family built a small building to serve food out of to capitalize on passing motorists.  Named Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant, word quickly spread and the humble enterprise grew.  People came from miles around and waited, sometimes for hours, to get a seat at a table.  In the 1940s, Walter had the idea to build some shops and other little curiosities to entertain patrons while they waited.  An enthusiast of the Old West pioneer culture, Walter Knott constructed a full-scale replica of an old Ghost Town, including authentic working railroad and stagecoach, and attendance grew exponentially.  Even when Disneyland opened down the road in the summer of 1955, Knott’s Berry Farm remained a mainstay of local fascination, probably due in no small part to the Calico Mine Ride being added in 1960 and park admission being free until 1968.  Even then, it only cost a quarter to get in.  A year later, the Timber Mountain Log Ride, the park’s first thrill ride was opened.  After Cordelia passed in the mid-1970s, Walter turned his attention to local politics (including sitting on the board of the Children’s Hospital of Orange County with friend and rival Walt Disney) and the Knott children took over the park, adding more traditional amusement park elements while maintaining the traditionalist spirit that Walter Knott started out with.  Walter died in the early 1980s but his children ran the park until the mid-1990s, when they decided it was time to sell to a third-party.  Michael Eisner, then CEO of the Walt Disney Company, was the most interested.

After the overwhelming success of opening Disneyland in Southern California in 1955 and Walt Disney World in 1971, the company began to expand into other markets.  Tokyo Disneyland opened in Japan in 1983 and Euro Disney opened near Paris in 1992.  Eisner, however, wanted another Disney park in the United States.  Building off of the Main Street, U.S.A. and Frontierland areas of existing parks and Walt Disney’s own enthusiasm for Americana, Eisner obtained co-operation from the state governor and development commission to build a historically themed amusement park in Northern Virginia.  Dubbed Disney’s America, the park would have been dedicated to celebrating United States history through education and entertainment.  However, major opposition by local citizens forced Disney to scrap the project.  Having recently faced similar defeat by locals in Southern California, where he tried to build a WESTCOT adjacent to Disneyland and a Port Disney in Long Beach, Eisner became determined to realize his dream of a historically themed Disney park.  When Knott’s Berry Farm came on the market in 1996, Eisner saw his opening.

Concept art for the layout of Disney’s America.

Already having a number of the elements that Eisner wanted to build in Disney’s America, Knott’s Berry Farm seemed a natural fit.  Plans were developed to move the entrance of the park to the replica of Independence Hall, which was then (and is still currently) sitting in the Knott’s Berry Farm parking lot across Beach Boulevard.  The park would have been expanded and Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents, featuring Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, would have been moved to the entrance plaza.  Most longtime areas and attractions would have been refurbished and rebranded to fit the Disney theme, while extra property would have been added to make room for new things, including Civil War re-enactments, a replica of Ellis Island, an authentic farm, a 1930s-type state fair section, and a mock airfield to commemorate the soldiers of both World Wars that would include the Dogfighter, what would have been the world’s first dueling inverted rollercoaster, and Soarin’, which would have been a simulated flight through California’s natural wonder.

Concept art for The Lewis & Clark River Expedition, a rapids ride through the American frontier.

Concept art for Industrial Revolution, a roller coaster themed to a late-19th century factory.

In spite of Michael Eisner’s grand ambitions, there were several roadblocks to his plans.  WESTCOT had been shut down by local residents that argued that the proposed structures and light shows would be an eyesore and Port Disney was put on ice when local businesses felt that the new park would have a negative affect on their commerce.  Similarly, though a theme park already existed on the property, locals objected to the rerouting of Beach Boulevard that expansion would require.  It was also a concern that the cost of refurbishment and construction of the park and figuring out a bus or monorail system to get guests to and from the main resort in Anaheim would be too high on top of the actual purchase of the property and its rights.  Regardless, Eisner was willing to move forward.  The biggest nail in the coffin came from the Knott children themselves.  Even though Walter Knott and Walt Disney had a strong working relationship, visiting each other’s parks, alternating operating hours of Knott’s and Disneyland, and joining forces on a number of local issues, the history between the two Orange County families ended up not amounting to much.  Concerned that the renaming of the park to Disney’s America would be the first of many changes to the park, the Knott family declined Disney’s offer out of fear that everything that Walter Knott had built would be gone in no time.  And that was that.  Disney’s America was dead.

In 1997, the Knott family sold the rights and property to Cedar Fair, famous for their Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio and owner of several other parks in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Missouri.  Cedar Fair didn’t change much about Knott’s Berry Farm initially.  They added a couple of roller coasters and the Soak City water park across the street and changed the steak house that my father had worked in my entire life into a pasta restaurant.  My dad left a couple of years later and it was years before I went back.

In the meantime, Michael Eisner went back to the drawing board, amalgamating his ideas for Disney’s America, WESTCOT, and Port Disney into a single new park on the Disneyland Resort property.  Opening in 2001, Disney California Adventure utilized a lot of the abandoned concepts, including touches of Americana and California’s history, a boardwalk area, a river rapids and forest section, and an airfield that features the highly popular Soarin’.  The new park proved moderately successful, but due to a number of other failed business moves and pressure from Disney board members, including Roy Disney himself, Eisner resigned as both executive and board member in 2005 and was replaced by his COO, Bob Iger.

Knott’s Berry Farm, post-Cedar Fair ownership.

I didn’t return to Knott’s Berry Farm until well after I had been to California Adventure a number of times.  With the exception of a couple of trips to their annual Halloween Haunt event, my first return to the park under normal operating conditions was probably around 2007 or 2008.  After several years of visiting the Disney parks on at least a monthly basis, my wife and I decided that we should start checking out some other local amusements that we hadn’t been to in a while.  We enjoyed annual passes to both the Los Angeles and San Diego Zoos, as well as SeaWorld, so nostalgia kicked in and we decided to get passes to Knott’s, too.  We had our passes for a year and probably went two, maybe three times.  It just made me sad.  Some of the historical stuff that Walter Knott had originated there was still present, but it was mostly covered by huge roller coasters.  The employees don’t seem to have the same enthusiasm as Disney’s Cast Members, a lot of the facilities don’t seem to be kept up, it feels like the park is overrun by obnoxious, rude teenagers, and most of the stuff I remember loving as a kid, like my Kingdom of the Dinosaurs ride that is now a laser tag arena, are gone.  I mean, like most stuff from youth, I probably remember it better than it actually was.  But, though the name is still the same, I feel like the spirit has been missing for a long time.  Which, ironically, was the thing that the Knott kids were afraid of Disney taking in the first place.

Children’s Programming

When I was about three, I watched “RoboCop” with my dad and his friends.  My mom was pissed about it.  I think she still is.  For about 15 years after, I couldn’t figure out why.

RoboCop was a shining example of justice in an unjust world.  How did I know this?  Because he was shiny.  Because he arrested crooks with his laser gun in the animated series.  Because I had fun playing with the cap-gun like action figures that posed a fire hazard to the carpet in my bedroom.  So imagine my surprise when I watched Paul Verhoeven‘s original 1987 “RoboCop” and it’s sequel, 1990’s “RoboCop 2” (directed by Irvin ‘The Empire Strikes Back‘ Kershner) when I was 18 and found that they are definitely adult-oriented blood baths.  Seriously.  If you’re of my generation and remember “RoboCop” as a kid but haven’t seen it since, check it out.  There’s death and dismemberment all over the place.  And don’t forget the profanity and nudity. No wonder my mom was so mad.

The thing is, I actually remember sitting in my high chair in the living room, eating a bowl of either macaroni and cheese or SpaghettiOs, and watching the robotic hero save the day and stop the bad guys.  What I didn’t remember was watching Peter Weller getting his arm blown off before being gunned down, leading to him becoming RoboCop.  I didn’t remember Miguel Ferrer getting his legs shot up and strapped to a bomb.  I didn’t remember Paul McCrane‘s skin being melted by toxic waste before the remains of his body exploded on the hood of a car.  And I definitely didn’t remember Kurtwood Smith (That ’70s Show‘s Red Foreman) being stabbed in the neck by RoboCop’s USB port.  And that’s just the ‘R‘-rated version that I saw as a child.  The movie had apparently been rated ‘X‘ 11 times before  Verhoeven cut it back enough to get an ‘R‘ from the MPAA.  Why did I even know this movie existed?

And as I think about it now, I knew about it the same way I knew about John Rambo, the Toxic Avenger, the Terminator, the gang from “Police Academy”, and the characters from the “Aliens” franchise:

Toys and cartoons.

Each of these had action figures geared at children between the ages of 5 and 12.  And all but the “Terminator” and “Alien” franchises had animated spin-offs.  But who made the decision to market these towards kids?

(I would now like to point out that I have no problem with any of these films.  The first two movies in the “Alien” and “Terminator” franchises are among my favorite films of all time, the first “Police Academy” is comedic gold, and the first “RoboCop” and the first Rambo flick, “First Blood”, are not only great action flicks, but have a bit more soul to them if you really give them a chance.  “The Toxic Avenger” even has its merits, though I’ve admittedly never taken the time to really get into it.)

The thing of it is, is that I can’t argue that I wasn’t too young to see movies like “RoboCop” and “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” at the young age that I did.  They were both rated ‘R‘ by the Motion Picture Association of America.

For those of you that are unfamiliar, the MPAA’s rating system as of 1990 is as follows:

G – General Audiences

All ages admitted. This movie contains nothing that would offend parents for viewing by children.Such films may contain only mild fantasy violence or crude humor. Such films have no nudity, sex or drugs of any kind. Alcohol and tobacco may be used in small amounts by adults in the movie, but not by minors, especially in older G rated films. The violence must be cartoonish in nature and/or minimal in quantity.

PG – Parental Guidance Suggested

Some material may not be suitable for children. Parents are urged to give parental guidance as the motion picture contains some material that parents might not like for younger children.Such films may contain only mild violence, language, drug references, brief nudity and/or implied or inferred sexual activity.

PG-13 – Parents Strongly Cautioned

Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. Parents are urged to be cautious and contain some material that parents might not like for their pre-teenagers.Such films may contain moderate violence, some suggestive material and nudity, some sexual situations, brief strong language and/or soft drug use.

R – Restricted

Under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian. This movie contains some adult material and parents are urged to learn more about this film before taking their young children with them to see it.Such films may contain rough and/or persistent violence and suggestive material, hard language and horror, crude sexual content, sexually-oriented nudity, and/or hard drug use.Admittance to these films is prohibited for anyone under the age of seventeen unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. Children under 17 or those who do not have ID (including state IDs and drivers’ licenses) are not allowed to attend R-rated movies unaccompanied by an adult.

NC-17 – No One 17 & Under Admitted

This film is patently adult and children are not admitted. Such films may contain brutality/pervasive strong graphic violence, explicit sexual content, sexual assault, extreme horror and/or crude indecent language, swearing and drug use.

So when I saw “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” (MPAA: “Rated R for strong sci-fi action and violence, and for language.“) in the summer of 1992 (when I was 8), I had no adult supervision with me.  I watch that flick now and, while I love it and think it’s an incredible visual accomplishment that raised the bar for compelling action movies, I wonder what in the world my grandmother was thinking when she saw that it was coming on HBO next, figured I’d like it, and left the room to do chores.  Robert Patrick’s T-1000 is fond of sticking sharp objects through people’s heads, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor can hardly make it through a sentence without lacing it with some form of profanity, and there’s a nuclear holocaust dream sequence that shows kids on a playground being reduced to skeletal remains before turning into ash.  According to the MPAA, Tipper Gore, and my mother, I had no business seeing this film.  And today, knowing several young children personally, I’m inclined to agree with them.

Yet I can’t.  Because, in spite of everything that I saw and heard that was beyond my maturity level, I don’t think it had a negative effect on me.  For one thing, I didn’t exactly have nightmares about it.  I will admit that I found the nuke scene and Xander Berkeley with a bloody blade protruding from his mouth and sticking through his milk carton hard to watch.  But in all honesty, I find them hard to watch now.  And I don’t think it’s so much that they’re “scary” images, but that I recognized then, as I do now, that they were horrible acts that no one should have to endure, let alone witness.  And though there is an abundance of profanity (thank you, Edward Furlong, for introducing me to “dickwad“), my mother never had to worry about me repeating any of it.  (Bart Simpson and my uncle are a different story and she threatened me accordingly.)  And regardless of the fact that I knew I was watching something that I wasn’t old enough to watch, I was fully capable of not watching it.  At eight-years-old, I was well aware that I could do anything from changing the channel to leaving the room if I was watching something that made me uncomfortable.  So it’s not like I was tied up with toothpicks holding my eyelids open.  So what did my eight-year-old self take away from “Terminator 2”?

1) Nukes suck.

2) Women cussing is kind of off-putting.

3) If you have the option to stop someone without killing them, you should exercise restraint.

4) It is noble to take responsibility for your actions.

5) Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the greater good.

6) You can get guns in Mexico.

7) Dickwad.

Can I reiterate that I was eight-years-old?

I have seen many things that I was probably too young to see at the age that I saw it.  I was a little too young to see stuff like “True Lies” (eleven-years-old) and “Braveheart” (twelve-years-old) when I saw them.  And I recognized that all the violence was nearly, but not quite, too much for me.  (The sex stuff was completely over my head.  Jamie Lee Curtis’ striptease was silly and what was supposed to look like simulated fellatio on Bill Paxton didn’t even register.)  But nothing about these adult oriented films scarred my pre-adolescent psyche.  They were entertaining and, in the case of “Braveheart”, emotionally powerful and intellectually stimulating.

So I know what you’re thinking.  If you were desensitized to ‘grown-up’ movies like these when you were that young, then what could have possibly frightened you?

Well.  A lot.

The things that I remember horrifying me the most when I was a kid weren’t blood-and-guts action movies.  They were things like Large Marge’s “ghost face” in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (rated ‘PG‘).  The nightmare sequence with all the stop-animation monster frogs in “The Bear” (also ‘PG‘).  The cute, fluffy, cuddly rabbit protagonists being ripped apart by dogs, hawks, farmer’s rifles, and each other in the animated “Watership Down” (also ‘PG‘).  The old lady at the docks that tries to coerce Jane and Michael into going with her in “Mary Poppins” (rated ‘G‘).  Atreyu’s faithful steed, Artax, drowning in the swamp in “The NeverEnding Story” (rated ‘PG‘).  Melting Nazi faces in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (rated ‘PG‘).  Cindel’s dream of attacking Marauders in “Ewoks: The Battle for Endor” (not rated, but a made-for-TV movie that aired as the ABC family movie of the week).  Antie the ant getting murdered by a scorpion in “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” (rated ‘PG‘).  And I’m sure I don’t need to bring it up, but let’s just go ahead and include the boat ride from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (rated ‘G‘).

All these things were, at the very least, unnerving.  But the tie for the flicks that screwed me up the most as a kid goes to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” (rated ‘PG‘), in which Judge Doom disintegrates a poor, defenseless ‘toon shoe in a drum of ‘Dip’, and “My Girl” (rated ‘PG‘), in which we’re treated not only to the death of a ten-year-old Macaulay Culkin but also his subsequent open-casket funeral.  The emotional toll that these took on my youth is still prevalent.  Twenty years later and I’ve never seen “My Girl” again, even though I can see the DVD sitting on the shelf from where I’m sitting.  And though I love “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and have seen it dozens of times, I almost always find a reason to avoid looking at the screen when that poor little shoe meets its demise.

I don’t know what any of this says about me.  Or how it compares to your movie viewing experience growing up.  But I think that when I have kids, particularly when they’re in their first decade of existence, I’m gonna make sure to investigate what they’re viewing before they view it.  I remember reading a piece by Stephen King in high school (it may have been the forward to Danse Macabre, but I’m not entirely sure) and it talking about how he decided on what films to let his young children have access to.  He had a shelf full of videos and his rule was that if they could reach it, they could watch it.  The stuff he didn’t think they could handle was on the top shelf.  This is where Walt Disney’s ‘G‘-rated 1937 animated classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” resided.  Several rows above what is commonly referred to as the scariest movie of all time, William Friedkin’s ‘R‘-rated 1973 Academy Award for Best Picture nominee, “The Exorcist”.  I guess he figured the witch would have more of an impact on his kids than a possessed child.  He was probably right.

The Goldilocks Syndrome!

Here it is.  The moment you’ve all been waiting for.  My first blog entry.

I’m not really sure where to go from here.  I started this thing to practice writing.  But now that I’m here, I don’t really have anything to say.  Which is discouraging.

I remember being at Comic-Con, I want to say in 2005, and happening to be at the Marvel booth as Olivier Coipel and Mark Brooks happened to sit down.  I immediately had Coipel sign an issue of what was his then-current run on The Uncanny X-Men (which I believe ended up only being two issues) and asked him to draw a sketch for me.  When he asked what I wanted, I replied “One of the X-Men“.  He decided on Nightcrawler and began doodling what would become one of my favorite pieces of original art.

A Nightcrawler sketch by Olivier Coipel from San Diego International Comic-Con 2005

All this isn’t really important.  I mean, it is.  Particularly to me.  And maybe at the time to a virtually unknown French comic book artist that had yet to make an industry splash on Brian Michael Bendis’ House Of M.  But while Coipel was sketching out the demonic Mr. Wagner, I engaged in conversation with the more English-proficient Mark Brooks.  We talked about comic books and super-heroes and nothing in particular.

And then the two other chairs at the crowdless table were filled.  The first guy, I knew from many photographs in Wizard.  His name was Peter David.  He wrote The Incredible Hulk and X-Factor during the ’90s and was very popular.  Being the humongous X-Men fan that I was, I had many of his X-Factor issues and knew them well.  His Hulk stuff, I knew from reading about the storylines from the backs of trading cards and thumbing through Wizard articles.  I also connected him to “Seinfeld”.  As a child of the ’90s, I remember watching “Seinfeld” with my parents and being amused by Kramer but didn’t really appreciate it until years later.  But I remember seeing the name Larry David in the credits.  And being a kid, for whatever reason, I always assumed that the guy that wrote about the Hulk and X-Factor was the same guy that created Jerry Seinfeld’s TV show with him.

Then this other older gentleman sits down next to him and it takes me a minute to realize who it is.  Sitting before me is Chris Claremont.  Prolific comic book author and basically the whole reason why I’ve always spent more time thinking about super powers and science fiction than sports and cars.  Now, I know that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby originated the X-Men in 1963.  I know that Len Wein and Dave Cockrum introduced the “all-new, all-different” team in Giant-Size X-Men #1 in 1975.  But as far as I was concerned, Chris Claremont created the X-Men.

The cover to X-Men Classic #71, May 1992

The cover to The Uncanny X-Men #167, March 1983

The first comic book I ever read was The Uncanny X-Men #167 from March 1983.  Well, technically, the first comic book I ever read was X-Men Classic #71 from May 1992.  But it was a reprint of Uncanny #167 that I got in 1992’s Easter basket.  (It can be noted that I also got a then-recent issue of Action Comics that introduced me to the Hellgrammite and a bearded, long-haired Lex Luthor, but that didn’t have nearly the impact on me.)  It introduced me to the X-Men: Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Binary, Sprite, Wolverine, and their leader, Professor Charles Xavier, who turned into a Brood Queen in this particular issue.  It also introduced me to the freshly minted New Mutants (Cannonball, Karma, Wolfsbane, Sunspot, and Psyche), Cyclops’ dad, Corsair, and his band of space pirates, the Starjammers, Colossus’ kid sister Illyana, Sprite’s pet dragon Lockheed, the Imperial Guardsman Gladiator, Xavier’s ex-girlfriend Dr. Moira MacTaggert, Xavier’s Shi’ar Empress girlfriend Lilandra, and the Fantastic Four (in their pajamas).  It was called “The Goldilocks Syndrome! (or ‘Who’s Been Sleeping in My Head?’)”, it was illustrated by Paul Smith, Bob Wiacek, and Glynis Wein, and it was written by none other than Chris Claremont.  I had no idea who any of them were or what was going on, but it started something that hasn’t stopped twenty years later.  From there, I jumped in, head first.  I grabbed anything X-Men related I could, from back issues and reprints to the newly introduced Toy Biz action figure line.  I scoured arcades for the video game (Colossus was my favorite) and got up early on Saturday mornings hoping to find a different episode of the animated series that featured the Wolverine with the Australian accent.  (Unbeknownst to me, the more prominent Fox animated series was still months away from its debut.)  Everything about my 8-year-old life was X-Men and I owed all of it to Chris Claremont.

So sitting there, waiting for Mr. Coipel to finish his very detailed sketch for me, I chatted with these titans of the comic book industry.  I sat there for probably half an hour (as Coipel inked the sketch) and absorbed all the wisdom I could, as well as the new perspective brought by Brooks.  They all shared favorites from when they were kids that lead them to want to work in the field, as well as how they each initially cracked the industry’s defenses.  By now, they were all well aware of my want to write a comic book of my own.  Which brought me to a question:  How did they come up with all of those stories for all those years and not run out of ideas?  And then Chris Claremont told me perhaps one of the most influential things anyone’s told me about writing:

“We don’t come up with stories to have something to write about, we write stories because we have something to say.”

Any time I’ve sat down to write in the eight years since, I’ve thought about that.  Because it goes hand-in-hand with the last thing that Peter David told me before I finally left them alone:  “Write.  Every day.  Even if you don’t know what to write before you sit down, just start writing.”  Every single time I’ve sat down to write, I’ve thought about what those two said to me.  And I’ve struggled.  Because all day long, I come up with ideas for stories.  In the shower.  Driving to and from work.  Even at work.  And lying in bed in the middle of the night.  But when it comes time to formulate those thoughts and ideas into words on a page, I never know where to start.  I know what I picture in my head as the end result, but all the thoughts are on top of each other and kind of overtake me to the point where I don’t know how to get them out.  I don’t know what it is I want to say.  So I’ve typically not said anything.  On my hard drive, there are dozens of folders filled with files that would lend one to believe that I’ve got a library’s worth of screenplays, novels, and songs to get out into the world.  But if you open them, you’ll find that most are just a handful of sentences, a few are a couple paragraphs and one or two actually have more than a page.  I’ll set something up.  But I won’t know what I want to say with it and something else will pop up and I’ll move on to my next unfinished genius idea.

So, again, I don’t know what to write.  But I’m writing.  Because that’s what Peter David told me to do.  And maybe the more I do it, I’ll figure out what it is I’m trying to say.