You found me? Wow! Congratulations, your research skills must be outstanding. Or do you happen to be romantically engaged with the masters of the streaming universe? No? Sure? Ok, I believe you.

No, I don’t! That’s not how it works.

Someone must have told you, and his, or looking at you more probably her guard must have been down, as happens in the context of sex. Or drugs. Or – no, I won’t go full cliché. Shut up, go away, leave me alone.

Yes, I would consider alcohol drugs. Yes, this statement does apply to really old whiskey. It’s still drugs.

Ok, you’re starting to make sense to the crumpy old creative. A couple of shots of whiskey can work wonders on a lady habitually running on decaf and low calorie isotonic slurp. Still surprised she mentioned me, after all these years. Quite pleasant, to be remembered. Would be even more pleasant to get my share, pecuniarily speaking, but still…

It all started with a textbook unsolicited submission.

You can’t just wake up and pitch to Netflix. You need an agent, to do it for you. His job, if you want to call this kind of address hoarding a job, is to know whom to contact, and what forms to use. The likes of Netflix, they won’t write on their website “Please contact let’s call her alice.bob@netflix.com to propose a show”, you know?

You need an agent. Or a dark web friend with access to a big bucket full of magically rerouted emails and some data mining skills. And here you are, contacting that same alice.bob@netflix.com, with exactly the right kind of header. A more diligently criminal mind than yours truly would have faked a known sender, to avoid any risk of being identified as spam, but I’m scared of police, never no go illegal.

And yes, it worked. Twenty minutes later, we were chatting via webex. Or rather, she was shouting at me. She was so upset, all wild. Called me a a raving disgrace to humankind, and more. Because even coming up with the idea for this show was supposed to be worse than all crimes against humanity ever committed. Bit harsh, bit over the top, but people in her line of work perhaps need that kind of temper, with all the entitled extroverts they have to deal with?

Anyway, she made it very, very clear that she would never, ever allow anything like this show to happen, on Netflix or wherever else I might dare pitch it. And me to promise to forget the stupid idea, and switch back to writing sci-fi. End of encounter.

And here we are, five years later, wondering what happen afterwards. Did she change her mind? How? Did someone else come up with that same idea, title and all, and reach out to a more experimentally minded strategy person? Who dunnit? Do you know?

An in-house development, too vaguely inspired by my initiative to make it worth mentioning or paying me? Honestly? See now, why I’m a crumpy old creative? Or would you like me to aggravate my humiliation by showing off the site sucker documentation of the website where I published the original scraps?

Just kidding, no plans to waste your time any further, grin.

Crumpy, as in crumpy old creative? Cross and grumpy. Got this weird habit of mutilating the English language as often as possible.