(Don’t go at it alone.)

I sometimes forget how much I love co-creating with people.

Actually, forget isn’t quite true. I crave this connection, and when it’s gone, I miss it terribly.

And while we’re at it, love isn’t quite true, either. It’s way more than that.?

It’s a passion, co-creating. It’s what I was made for.

This weekend, I was reminded just how much this means to me in a live table read of one of my feature screenplays, right here in San Francisco.

The reading took place in the beautiful boardroom at CANOPY Space in Jackson Square in the shadow of the iconic Columbus Tower.

Think Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope.

Speakeasies, artists and entertainment moguls.

Fairy tales, legends and lies.

Did you get there? If you did, you get an idea of what it felt like to workshop SONS OF CAIN, a feature fantasy script about San Francisco, co-written with Susan Lockwood in San Francisco, as a love story to San Francisco.

I couldn’t have chosen a better backdrop, or better actors to lift the story from the page and help me see what it is and could be, what works and doesn’t, where my mind fills in blanks and where my imagination hits something a little too on the nose.

To have people gather around a table and help me work, line by line, through this project —?artists who have invested in themselves and their craft, passed on going out to dinner or sleeping in to take that next step in their artistic journey, pushing everything incidental to the back so that only the most important things can take center stage —? I mean, what an honor.

There’s more to say on this. Like, this script is a multi-season television series / franchise trying to pass itself off as a two-hour movie (it’s failing).

And there’s a secondary character that really deserves more screen time. (Hello, shape-shifter Rory.)

Et cetera.

Suffice to say, I’ve got my work cut out for me. (YES!!)

For now, the takeaway here is this: Find your co-creative partners. In whatever field.?

Nurture those relationships.

Hold onto them, for however long they make sense.?

Do it for you — and for them.

Don’t go at it alone. Because there’s no need to. In work as in life, we’re not designed for solo flights.

And when you get to do what I got to do this weekend with the people I got to do it with, why would you ever choose to do anything else?

P.S.: If you’d like to see the trailer for SONS OF CAIN spec script, you can find it right here.

P.P.S.: If you are an entertainment industry professional, you can access the complete spec script, pitch bible, marketplace viability and more here.