This is partial rewrite of a post I put up here on November 21, 2012. We were talking about a bunch of rules that the fine author Robert Heinlein had laid down for writers…

Robert A. Heinlein had five rules for writing:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

I feel odd just typing the words, "I disagree with Robert Heinlein" but I disagree with Robert Heinlein…a little. And I don't think the differences are due to him writing for different markets.

Yes, you must write. Yes, you must finish things but you don't have to finish everything you start. I seriously doubt Mr. Heinlein ever wrote the first few paragraphs of a story, realized it wasn't going anywhere but thought, "Rats! My premise isn't very sound but since I started this thing, I have to finish it." Even a man as clever as Robert Heinlein was has some ideas that are better than others and there's no shame in pitching the weaker ones.

So I agree with #1 and I think #2 should read, "You must produce a decent amount of finished, ready-to-sell material" or words to that effect.

In #3, I suspect what he meant is that you shouldn't keep polishing and rewriting and doing Draft #93 to stall the moment at which you send a piece of writing into the world for acceptance or rejection. Certainly, he didn't mean that if you write something and decide the middle is weak, you shouldn't go back and rewrite it. (As I recall, when Harlan Ellison quotes these rules, he appends to #3 something like, "…assuming you think the editorial order isn't stupid." I'm with Harlan on that.)

I'm not sure I agree with #4 or #5, which are pretty much the same rule. I have a screenplay that I wrote years ago that I liked at the time. I was alone in this opinion. No one else who read it thought much of it, not even my agent who was my agent because he liked most everything I did.

At my insistence, he submitted it to a number of producers and I gave it to a few. Not only did no one leap to buy it but I came to the conclusion that it was lowering their opinions of me as a writer. That is never a good thing.

So I stopped submitting it. Years later, I gave it another read and decided I was right to give up on it. The writer who thinks he never writes anything below the standard he seeks to maintain is a chowderhead.

Once its flaws became more obvious to me, I briefly considered revising it and trying again. Then I decided that time could be put to wiser use. I have other, better ideas — at least, I hope they're better — that I haven't had time to pursue. Why devote that energy to an idea I don't even like that much now.

I somehow don't think Mr. Heinlein would urge me to decide otherwise. Another maxim of the writing game is to always lead with your best. No matter what I do to it, I don't think the script no one liked will ever be my best.

As a writer, your value to those who hire or buy is that you give them something that is of use to them. You give an editor a book he thinks is worth publishing. You give a producer a script he thinks is worth producing. An editor or producer faces the same imperative as you. Just as you have to write, they have to cause product to be created.

If you deliver material that make this possible, you are of use to them and they will like you (enough) and give you money (sometimes enough) and enable your work to go onto the next step of printing or publication — which is presumably what you really want.

Heinlein was railing against writers who don't write…or don't write enough. I'm with him on that. I think the profession is glutted with too many people who excuse (or worse, romanticize) non-production. Yes, you can't sell a half-finished piece. You also can't sell a rotten piece…or if you can, sometimes you shouldn't.

I don't like critiquing other writers' work but every so often, I get roped into reviewing portfolios or samples at a convention. I showed up at a con once and without telling me, they'd advertised that I would review materials by wanna-be comic book writers and artists and advise them on how much potential they had or suggest where they could get work…or something.

I hate doing this kind of thing. My head is full of my own unfinished stories and I don't have room to cram someone else's in there. I also don't feel my opinions are so infallible that someone else should be basing the management of their career on them. I've seen lots of published comics or produced movies based on scripts I would have deemed unworthy.

When I'm stuck inspecting samples, one sign of outright amateurism I encounter is this. A kid will come up to show me his artwork and before I've even formulated a snap opinion — sometimes, before I've even opened the folio — they start with the excuses: "I did this a few years ago"…"Oh, I did that one when I had the flu"…"I had a lot of trouble with my pen on this one…" An oft-heard one is, "I know this looks bad there but the editor insisted I do it that way."

As I've learned from others who do these critiques more often and willingly, the proper response is to close the portfolio, hand it back to them and say, "Come back when you can show me only work you're proud of." It's usually the most valuable advice you can give these folks and I can't square that with Heinlein's #3-5.

Like I said, I'm not comfy disagreeing with one of my favorite authors but I think he would have approved of any writer who created a lot of work and saw most of it go on to be published or produced. There's also that happy bonus when you're at least reasonably proud of most of it.

Oh, and the money. The money can be nice, too.

Welcome to what might just be the worst week in the life of Donald J. Trump. Oh, the week he lost to Joe Biden might have been the worst but Donald was able to pretend he won…and he even got an awful lot of people to join him in denial. Amazingly, some people still buy into that after Trump lost every single case he brought to prove it, even being shot down by judges he appointed.

Last week, losing all that money to E. Jean Carroll might have been the worst until this one. This one will include the judgement in a civil case that will make the 83 mil look like pocket change. And his public utterances will grow even more insane.

If you don't understand this man and why he's acting the way he does, go to YouTube and watch any recent video with George Conway, a man who knows Trump well. Here… I'll link you to one.

One of my (and I hope your) favorite sketches from one of my (and I hope your) favorite years of Saturday Night Live.

Someone who bills himself as "Trevor the Games Man" wrote to me about something that isn't really worth it lot of discussion so of course we're going to discuss it…

I'm a full-time entertainer. A gender-neutral word for "showmanship" is "stage presence", as in "That performer has such excellent stage presence: they had the audience in the palm of their hand the entire show."

I dunno, Trevor the Games Man, I always thought the word "showmanship" applied to a person who put on the show even if they themselves did not perform. In the case of your shows, I suspect you do both. "Stage Presence" is what an individual performer or act brings to the proceedings. My friend, the late Max Maven, used to define it, at least with with regards to magicians, as "Establishing a rapport with the audience that makes them eager to follow you wherever you take them."

Which I guess is the same as your definition. I still think I need a word to describe the quality a lady would be demonstrating if she assembled but did not appear in a great show.

One of my favorite magicians, Daniel Roy, demonstrates his version of the classic trick/swindle, The Three Card Monte. Don't blink…

This is a rerun from 4/22/10. Hope you like it…

In his latest column, my friend and former partner Dennis Palumbo discusses the tendency for a writer to hold onto a line and to keep trying to find a place for it. This is absolutely true with most of us who write for a living.

And Dennis's piece reminded me of a joke that Evanier and Palumbo once wrote, managed to get into a script…and then we couldn't get rid of it fast enough. Every writer has a couple of these, too.

It was while we were working on Welcome Back, Kotter. There was an episode in which Vinnie Barbarino (the Travolta character) was making his acting debut. Around 3 AM one morning, a day or two before we taped, Dennis and I found ourselves punchy from lack of sleep and desperate from lack of a funny line for Mr. Woodman, the surly vice-principal. We needed to have him say something, get a laugh and then get out of the scene. We had to come up with it before we could get out of the office and go home.

One of us said, "Let's have Woodman say something about how he used to be a great actor."

The other one of us said, "Yeah…He could say, 'Y'know, Kotter, I used to be a pretty good actor. In college, we did Of Mice and Men.'"

And then in unison, we finished the line: "I played Mice."

We laughed for about six minutes. If you'd been that tired, you would have laughed, too. Then I typed it into the script, we laughed for three more minutes and we finally got the hell out of there. We thought it was the funniest line in the world…and at 3 AM, it was. In fairness to us, the next day the cast and the rest of the staff liked it a lot — enough that it stayed in, all the way through Tuesday afternoon. That was when we did the "dress rehearsal" — the first of two tapings that day — in front of very live audiences.

Mr. Woodman was played by a lovely little man named John Sylvester White. John was very funny on the show but he suffered through moments of pure stage fright. About ten minutes before he had to go before the cameras, he would become convinced that none of his lines would work, that the audience would hate him and that his career was but seconds from total ruination. This never came close to happening but it was often necessary to reassure him that he'd get laughs, that the audience would love him, etc. That afternoon, just before the show was to be performed the first time, Dennis and I wandered onto the set and John, in a state of panic, grabbed us.

He was in full make-up but he still looked pale. "That Mice and Men joke," he said. "Is that really funny?" We promised him the viewers would howl and he took us at our word and went out to do the show. Things went pretty well up until that moment, the moment when Mr. Woodman turned to Gabe Kaplan and said, "Y'know, Kotter. I used to be a pretty good actor. In college, we did Of Mice and Men. I played Mice!"

And then there was silence.

Absolute, dead silence. Not a laugh, not a chuckle, not a snicker. You would hear more noise if you were floating in the orbital path of Mars…and wearing earplugs.

And then because, I guess, he felt he had to say something before his exit and didn't particularly want to take the rap for the Mice joke, Mr. Woodman announced to Mr. Kotter, "Evanier and Palumbo told me that would get a laugh." The audience exploded in hysterics. Maybe the biggest laugh I ever heard on that stage. They didn't know who the hell Evanier and Palumbo were but they knew exactly what had happened.

Needless to say, the line was changed before the final taping…changed to something that the second audience actually laughed at. In-between the two tapings, there was a dinner break and everyone on the crew looked at Dennis and me and shook their heads, though a few were kind enough to say, "Well, I thought it was funny." When we worked on the following week's script, Dennis talked me out of a line I wanted to put in. I wanted Woodman to say, "Y'know, Kotter. I used to be a pretty good actor. In college, we did Of Mice and Men. I played Men!"

Like Dennis said in his article, some of us just don't know when to give up. I still think the Mice line would have killed if we'd aired the show at 3 AM.

Can any state become un~united from the United States? Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone says no and here's his explanation why…

Brian Dreger wrote to ask…

Being that you've been around magicians a lot, I'm wondering if you ever met Kreskin a.k.a. The Amazing Kreskin. But if you haven't met him, what did you think of him as a performer? I really liked the guy, although I sometimes thought he over-explained the set up to a trick.

You can like many aspects of what a magician does beyond the ingenuity of his or her tricks. One of my favorite magicians was a gent named Don Alan whose magic was not that amazing but whose ability to be funny throughout the entire presentation was unmatched. You can like a magician's style or his/her showmanship (Is there a gender-neutral synonym for "showmanship?") You can like the manual/physical dexterity. There are all sorts of things.

No, I never met Kreskin. Never saw him in person either, though once I was in Laughlin, Nevada for a few days and he was playing at the hotel right across the street. I saw an ad — I think tickets to his show were $9.95 or even lower — and there was a number to call for reservations. I thought, "Reservations? If Kreskin's any good, he oughta just know I'm coming and save a seat for me!"

But I never got over there. I'd have liked to see him because I liked his style and patter, especially when he was guesting on someone else's show and had time restraints put on him. He had his own show for a while and I recall that he would take a solid three-minute trick and stretch it out to what felt like ten.

But! In the last decade or two I developed an aversion to magicians who pass perfectly simple magic tricks off as genuine psychic power or telepathy. I'm one of those people who believes — no, knows that there ain't no such thing as genuine psychic power. I could tolerate and even appreciate it with someone like my pal, the late Max Maven. Max did it with style and in a manner that…well, you'd have to be really, really dimwitted to think it was anything but a trick.

But I have seen magicians who felt that a vital part of their act was convincing the audience that their "psychic powers" were bona fide. I have to wonder how many of them acted as a kind of gateway drug for the kind of people who fall prey to the Sylvia Brownes of the world. I'm talking about connivers who feign such powers to bilk the bilkable.

At the Magic Castle, I have occasionally seen audience members who forgot that the building they were in had the word "Magic" in its name. They didn't think that a magician actually sawed the lady in half but they seemed to think that the only conceivable way a different magician could have known the spectator picked the three of diamonds was if he had genuine supernatural powers.

In fact, at the Castle, you will often see a magician have an audience member pick a card, show it to everyone except the magician, then return it to the deck. The deck is then shuffled yet somehow the magician locates and identifies the card. That happens all the time and if it's in the context of doing card tricks, no one thinks the magician has done something unearthly…unless he or she claims psychic powers. If he or she acts like he or she does, someone in the audience may come away thinking that is so.

I have highly-mixed feelings about feeding that kind of gullibility. So I have slightly-mixed feelings about Kreskin, especially now that he's marketing a pendulum that you get when you sign up for one of his Zoom lectures. What's the deal with this pendulum? Here's part of the sales spiel reachable through his website…

Have questions, quandaries, or issues you can't quite figure out? In less than 5 minutes, Kreskin's Pendulum technique can help you tap into your unconscious mind and provide a second opinion.

I think that's crossing the line, working the same side of the street as those folks who charge you loads o' cash to think you're communicating with your dead relatives.

So I liked Kreskin the Magician but I'm not fond of Kreskin the Psychic. That's a long answer to a short question. If you knew I was going to do that, it doesn't mean you have psychic abilities.

Yes, it"s another fine day to not be Donald Trump. And if you think today's $83M judgement against him is bad, wait'll you see what the next court orders him to cough up.

I wish the news media would rerun that clip of Trump promising his followers that he would loosen libel laws so they could sue people who lie and therefore make "lots of money." He seemed very fond of libel suits then and didn't regard them as violations of the First Amendment.

Hey, wanna watch an entire Three Stooges movie? This is the 1962 film, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. I recall liking it when I saw it at the Bruin Theater near UCLA in Westwood. Of course, I was ten at the time. That might have had something to do with it…

UPDATE: I can't seem to get the embed to work so here's a link to watch it over on YouTube. And note that the poster there shows Larry, Moe and Curly Howard, not Curly Joe DeRita.

Steve Thomas sent me a question that I could probably answer in one sentence but you know me. I'm going to tell a long story…

Were you ever invited to write for the Oscars? If so, what was it like; if not, have you ever been interested?

Sort of but not really. When I was writing a lot of variety shows, I got two or three invites not to write for the Academy Awards show but to go in and talk to whoever was going to hire the writing staff — to interview for the job, basically. And I never went in. The invites always coincided with when I was not available because of something else I was writing. After a while, I stopped getting those invites.

There are some writers I know — no names — who in this situation would say, "Yeah, they kept coming after me to write the Oscars but I kept turning them down," implying they turned down actual, firm offers. I think it's important to be extremely honest about this kind of thing, not just because it's bad to mislead others but because it's dangerous to mislead yourself.

Now, at some point my agent retired from the business and I haven't really had an agent since. When I get the kind of job that involves negotiations and complex contracts, my lawyer handles that for me. Once in a while since then, I've talked with agents about representation but I've never met one I really "clicked" with.

One day, I got a call asking me to come in and meet with a rather important producer who was about to undertake what would be his first animated movie. Someone had recommended he talk to me and so with no advance knowledge of what the movie was, I went to his office in a big motion picture studio office building. We made the usual small talk and we got along well…and then he told me what the project is. They wanted to do an animated feature about Barbie. The doll.

I thought about it for two seconds and then I set some sort of world's record for talking yourself out of a job. I said, "Really? Don't you want to have it written by some lady who played with Barbie dolls when she was younger and loved them?"

And this producer thought for two seconds and said, "Hmm…maybe I do."

So suddenly there was no job there for Mark. I gave him the names of a couple of very good writers I knew who fit what I'd described and as far as I know, he never called any of them. Nor did he ever make an animated Barbie anything. Deals fall through all the time in this business and I guess that happened here. Not the least bit unusual.

But getting back to that meeting: He now had forty minutes or so until his next meeting and I think he felt bad about ending ours so abruptly after I'd schlepped all the way in. So we sat and talked, mostly about movies he'd produced which I'd liked. There were several posters on his office wall plus one for the most recent Academy Awards ceremony for which he'd also been a producer. I thought it was one of the better ones in recent memory and I told him so.

We talked for a while about what I'd liked about it and what I hadn't liked about it and he told me some things he hadn't liked about it. We must have discussed past Oscar telecasts for fifteen minutes when he said, "They've asked me to produce the one for next year and I'm thinking about it. Depending on how some of my other projects shake down in the next few weeks, I may or may not do it. If I do, could I hire you as one of the writers?" I told him he could and we left it at that.

A week or three later, he called me to say he was turning down the Oscars but that he'd given my name to…someone…with the recommendation that I have my agent give them a call. That was very nice of him. The trouble was I didn't have an agent. I also didn't know who "them" was to have somebody call. My lawyer said he'd make the call if I could figure out to whom it should be placed.

I called the Motion Picture Academy and…well, that's now a real smart, efficient organization but at the time, if you'd called up and asked them for their address, I'm not sure anyone there would have been able to tell you. I couldn't find anyone to tell me who was in charge of the upcoming Academy Awards telecast. It had not yet been announced.

I went back to my lawyer and he said, "You really do need an agent not just for this but for everything. I know a number of them. I'm going to set up some appointments for you to meet some of the best ones" and fortunately, I had one of those rare attorneys who always does what he says he's going to do. Within a few days, I had three appointments with three (apparently) very good agents.

It had been a few years since I'd talked to any agents about representation and I guess the ground rules had shifted a bit. They were all enthused about representing not only me but comic book properties I'd worked on like Groo, The DNAgents, Space Circus and Crossfire. Each of those agents told me how we'd sell some network on a package: me and him as Executive Producers, me as showrunner, his agency representing the whole thing…

"And taking a packaging fee on the whole project?" I asked.

To which each agent answered with some version of "Well, of course. That's how it's done these days,"

I asked each agent, "Are you interested in representing me as a writer?" I told them about the Academy Awards thing and asked, "Would you track down the right person to submit me to and make that call?"

One of them said, "Why would I do that?" The other two said, "Mark, this agency doesn't do those kinds of deals."

And that's pretty much the end of this story. No one ever called to try and get me a job on the Academy Awards and I only talked with one other agent since about representation. He wanted me but the folks above him wouldn't take me in because one of their *star* clients wanted the movie rights to one of the properties mentioned above and I wouldn't/couldn't let him have them. I seem to get along fine these days without an agent. And without working on the Academy Awards…which I no longer would be willing to watch, let alone work on.

Some time ago here, I told you about a documentary called Stu's Show all about my buddy Stu Shostak who hosts the podcast Stu's Show. It's about two things, one being how Stu went from being an avid fan of classic television to being a curator, broadcaster and friend to folks who worked in classic television. I'm talking about people like Lucille Ball and Dick Van Dyke. It doesn't get more classic than those two.

That's one part of the documentary. The other is how Stu met this lovely lady who was the perfect match for him because she loved classic teevee and they got involved and things were copacetic until one day, completely out of the blue, she had a brain aneurysm. The story of what Stu did to keep her alive will warm whatever size heart you have. It's really quite an extraordinary tale filled with stars of vintage TV shows — and (fair warning) me.

You may not have viewed this when I first talked about it because it cost money to do that. Well, now it's free on a great many Roku stations and online. Right here would be a good place to view it. You'll be glad you did.

My longtime pal Jim Brochu was friends with Zero Mostel and starred in and wrote Zero Hour, a one-man show in which he played the great Mostel. I wrote about it here many times and even provided this link where you can still view this fine production in full.

But first, here's Jim biddi-biddi-bumming for us, re-creating one of Zero's most famous numbers…

I'm no less busy than I was yesterday but I wanted to share my delight that Jon Stewart is returning to The Daily Show even if it's just for one day per week. I suspect it's because he likes the challenge of broadcasting Fake News that's more outrageous than the real stuff these days.

Donald What'shisname used to brag that he hired "All The Best People." That has become demonstrably false. All the good people he hired now either are working against him winning another term or they're under indictment…or both. All the bad ones are on his legal team and you can see how well that's turning out for him. Wow.

One of these days, I may or may not tell you what I'm doing today but trust me: You'd forgive me for neglecting you, Dear Blog Readers. There will be little or no posting, which is what that silly soup can indicates. Thank you for understanding that which at the moment, you do not understand.