A Working Actor's Lament (Chapter 47)

An Actor's Job Is Never Done

You would think that I would have enough to do with trying to get my acting career off the ground without having to add more stuff to my plate, like writing scenes for my acting class (not to mention taking acting class), writing more short film scripts, trying to find an agent, submitting my short film to festivals, taking actor's headshots, blah, blah, blah...

I was looking over a website called Backstage, which is solely for actors where they have stories that are relevant to the actor, as well as audition notices. After looking over all the students filmmakers who where looking for that "male, 20's, abs of steel", I went back to the home page and noticed that the company was looking for actors to blog about any and all experiences they might have had while trying to make it in the film industry. I cut and pasted a couple of my blogs that pertained to my plight here in Los Angeles from this very site (as well as a couple of new blogs) and emailed it to the person who was looking for new help. I immediately got a call (and I am not kidding when I say it was about 5 minutes later) from Tom who told me that my blogs were good except 1) Take out all the photos and 2) Don't make them longer than 500 words. Yeah, like that was possible.

After cutting out most of the words to the proper length and all the photos that day, I sent it back to Tom, where he called me back within another 5 minutes (I started to think this guy had no life, or really needed to find some busy work). He liked them but wanted to run them by his editor. That was on Monday of last week.

Just now, I received a call from Tom saying they are interested in my writing for the online magazine. It won't start till the end of January but they definitely would like to have my writings on their website for other actors to read and learn from. And here is the kicker: they are going to pay me...for something I already do anyway. I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!!!

I am not sure how much time I am going to have in regards to my diary blog you are reading right now. They told me they would like 3 blogs a week minimum once I start. I will try to keep these up since these will be more personal experiences about auditions and such, where as I think the one I will be writing for Backstage will be more of a general experience. I will keep all of you informed about when my first one is actually up on the site, and any ideas you might want to hear my opinions on would be more than welcome. I think it might be hard to have 3 acting experiences a week (but here is hoping I do).