You know, it's funny. People on here have been overwhelmingly flattering. I sincerely wish I could appreciate it. The issue is that - to put it frankly - this thing is a trifle, a couple days' worth of work to use up some excess creativity. I would go as far as to call it "trite."

I have writing that I worked excessively fucking hard to bring to light. Everything shown here, in fact, and then some:

Yet a lot of that has been straight up hated on by people paid to hate on writing. Even the stuff that is liked is generally answered with "yes, I thought it was nice." The best compliment I ever got was from another writer who said "yeah, it was good. Annoyingly good. I wish I'd written it."

I optioned one of them - that's where someone pays you money for the right to keep you from selling it to someone else for a limited period of time - to a director who paid me to rewrite it. He'd said the script was 'perhaps the best thing he'd ever read.' Then I spent four months slavishly rewriting it to suit his needs and he decided it was horrible and never wanted to touch it again. He's cordial, but distant now. Same story went to the lady that greenlit GALAXY QUEST. "Nice script, but not for us."

I wonder if the difference is that "civilians" aren't looking for reasons to hate something. After all, if you spend two hours reading a story, it's a success if you don't feel that two hours wasted. If you spend two hours reading a script, the best possible thing is for you to hate it because then you don't have to do anything else. If you like it, you have to show it to other people, who will judge you based on your taste. At the basis of this, the very larval soul of it, is the thought "I think this is worth spending $100m of other people's money and three years of other peoples' time turning into a 2-hour document that will be written about in the Hollywood Reporter a half-dozen times."

Even my screenwriting friends who have read "Restaurant" generally respond with "you should edit it more."

It sucks. Everyone is so friendly and respectful and encouraging about how great my writing is, and my only instinct is to think "that's because you don't know good writing."

Victim of my avocation, I guess.