So these last two days, I have been getting up at 4:30 a.m. and going till my brain melted in the evening (I am NOT a morning person!!!), called to create a Pitch Deck for my upcoming meeting with Melissa Verdugo on Monday. So bummed I missed last week's session! So I pushed it through with Primal Forge, and I have to say we had a blast! I learned what has to go on which pages. PF, now permanently called "Coach," got an eye full and an earful of rugby history and my personal story. Both of us survived! And here is our creation for my first screenplay, A Rugby Trainer's Daughter. I would love to hear your thoughts! "Coach" decided I have a documentary project to add to my to-do list after hearing about my trip to both hemispheres, seeing some of my photos, and distributing my rugby memorabilia collection to museums and archives for generations to come. So after I let everything go, I had the mental and emotional space to write my rugby story, and now we have even come up with a title for my next documentary, The Third Half. Just when I thought I was lightening my bones with one story, there's that spark of creativity for another. Oh my days, the fire is hot inside the Writer's Forge, and I like it!

I am so blown away at the timing of the Universe right now! Today, July 3rd, 2026, the World Rugby Museum just posted about my Dad, his jacket, and the collection I donated, and it's making me cry happy tears! This is so going in my Pitch Deck now! This is the post from the World Rugby Museum with a photo of my dad's jacket. https://www.facebook.com/wrugbymuseum/posts/pfbid0vLxEuWSJuYBryyt3uY2YEXnoDtBV3SRx551N5FidsksEto8FMrBDtio9vPkUHpZYl This is the blog the Director wrote about my dad, his jacket, my team, and their wild episode of eating wine glasses at the banquet dinner in Leningrad in 1978, in this way: "With B.A.T.S., Markson had his work cut out. In true rugby style, he was as often to be found treating extreme hangovers as he was physical injuries. In later years, during a memorable trip into the Soviet Union, specialist aid had to be administered to the B.A.T.S. team after several members accidentally ate wine glasses. Markson was, perhaps fortunately, absent on that occasion." They didn't do it accidentally; they did it to intimidate the KGB agents, one of whom was Putin at the time, but he didn't want to inspire others to do this on rugby tours, very nice of him! In my documentary film, "Organized Mayhem: The B.A.T.S. Rugby Club Story" on YouTube, the guys describe the what and why, and the disastrous results when one player didn't understand the how. https://worldrugbymuseum.com/from-the-vaults/museum-collection/trainer-of-bats?fbclid=IwY2xjawS013lleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFsUlNqMEtwWWZORDFCYXF6c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHkXR_1vMvgSonkOZGM4l7mtFC8hj-id2mtF_4tcEmvTolToUsUSln2n58gaB_aem_lf-aQcxB4F1lgJ1GpPU69w

I received this email and asked David if it could be posted; he said yes. So here it is. Check it out and submit! This Weekend Only: 40% OFF all Five Contests at Where Hollywood Hides Inbox Where Hollywood Hides WGA_Judges@wherehollywoodhides.com via mlsend2.com Jul 3, 2026, 7:01 PM (5 hours ago) to me View in browser Our 4th of July Firecracker Sale is live! For the next few days only, you can take 40% off entries to all five Where Hollywood Hides screenplay contests on the FilmFreeway contest platform. And for this weekend only, professional written feedback is included with every entry. Use the FilmFreeway link and discount code for the contest you're entering! (Yes, you can enter in more than one!) The Wiki Screenplay Contest ("The World's Fastest") For FAST FEEDBACK to find out if your script is ready to show to managers-agents-producers! Enter HERE for 40% OFF. Be sure to use Discount Code WIKI40 The Santa Barbara International Screenplay Awards This is where serious writers are evaluated by WGA writers and producers providing Professional Analysis using real industry standards. Enter HERE for 40% OFF. Be sure to use Discount Code SBISA40 Santa Barbara Screenplay Awards Diverse Outreach Designed for New Voices from underrepresented and diverse backgrounds who are serious about elevating their work to a market-ready level.

Most screenwriters are formatting before their character is alive. The problem is that format feels like progress. INT. DINER - NIGHT. Clean margins. Courier 12. It looks like a real script, so you start defending it. That leads to months polishing dialogue and protecting scenes built on an engine that was never running. Ninety pages that look like a movie and feel like nothing. Technically perfect. Emotionally dead. And you can't figure out why nobody leans in. // I know because I did it for years. I moved to Hollywood at 22. The Rugrats Movie came when I was 33. In between: - Three and a half years in aerospace, where I thought I'd die of boredom - Journalism - Advertising - Sketch comedy Every job built a skill. None of it coalesced. Because at the keyboard I did what you're probably doing right now. I ran to the script. I told myself I'd find the story in the drafting. That wasn't a process. That was me treating my ADHD. // Then Sherry Lansing, the President of Paramount, wouldn't let me. She made my writing partner and me write the treatment over and over. And over. She wouldn't let me run to the pages. She made me find the story. The story came from character. And once it was right, the screenplay emerged from it. First draft in five weeks. The notes went from "there's a lot of great stuff here" to "you've written a beautiful story and you should be very proud." That movie opened at #1, beat Will Smith's Enemy of the State, and made $100 million. Eleven years of skills finally coalesced, because someone held my feet to the fire. // So here's what I'd do instead. Build the character before you build a single scene. - The Wound - The Lie - The small life they've settled for - The hunger underneath the plot Then forge the whole movie in prose, a treatment and then a scriptment, while it's still soft enough to change. This is because a living character generates the story. Structure stops being a checklist you force from outside. It becomes pressure the character produces from inside. The scenes have to exist, because the character makes them.

Had an idea this morning while flying to NY. The 2 coaching sessions this week were electric — both writers broke through in ways that made me stop and think: what exactly am I teaching when I do this? So I ran the transcripts through ChatGPT and Claude to see what patterns they found in my coaching. After years of instinct, it finally clicked: what I’m teaching isn’t structure — it’s emotional authorship. How to write from your characters instead of about them. How to find the wound that shaped them, the lie that protects them, and the truth the story exists to expose. That’s the forge — the moment when a writer stops moving characters around the board and starts feeling what drives them. So here’s the experiment: Can AI be trained to help writers Forge Creativity, Not Replace It? I know — AI is the third rail of the creative world right now. But this isn’t about replacing writers. It’s about revealing them. I’m calling it The Primal Forge GPT. It’s not a note bot. It’s not a formula machine. It’s a tool trained directly on how I coach writers — to help you uncover the wound, lie, and truth that make a character come alive. The goal isn’t polished pages. It’s to get unstuck — to feel what’s really driving your story, the emotional engine beneath the plot. If you’re curious, drop a logline, a scene, or even a full treatment into The Primal Forge GPT and see what happens. This is just an experiment, so it might totally fail. No worries if it does — that’s part of what we teach here. Don’t be afraid to charge headlong down rabbit holes that might lead nowhere. Even a dead end is good data. If a few of you want to try it as a brainstorming or journaling tool and share honest feedback — useful or annoying — I’d love to hear it. This is just one of many tools I hope to experiment with and bring you in the coming weeks. Click here for The Primal Forge GPT. Let’s see if we can teach a machine to help us find more humanity in our own stories. 🔥