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As I run past first, round second, curve my way through third, and head on home in my current writing projects, I'm at my favorite crossroad of life. Namely, it involves the question of what do I write next. I used to write all the ideas down and then go back to them to figure out which ones I really take the time and effort to produce.

So far, here's what's waiting on deck to step up to the plate:

1) Nick Garlands Last Night In Town

This is a screenplay that I've already started, based upon (and hopefully starring) my friend, Nick Garland. Just to clarify: he's not leaving town, this is a fictional story, but it is hopefully going to be a showcase of San Diego talent and creative individuals who are associated with So Say We All. That's the underlying hope. But on a story level, it is about a guy who has lived in San Diego all his life and is following his long-time girlfriend out to Chicago, where he hopes to make it big on the comedy circuit. During his last night in town, he finds out his girlfriend actually left Chicago and came back to SD, leaving him with the major dramatic question of should he still leave? (Answer: hell yeah...)

2) SexBot 2400

As of last week, I've been a nerd gamer for sixty days. Rejoice! And while I've not fully acquired all the skills of Everquest to be a joystick fiend, I have learned a few things. This play would be about a quality assurance game tester who is given the task of testing a new, interactive game called SexBot 2400. It is a robotic woman who is incredibly lifelike and the objective is to find a way to have sex with her. With most of the gaming community not knowing quite how to interact on a social level, it is meant to boost their face-to-face skills and give a middle management megalomaniac the power she needs to take over the company. The only catch: it is impossible to have sex with the SexBot 2400.

3) The Draftsman

Came up with this last night while watching B.D. Wong in the good (if uneven) Herringbone. Is it a play or a movie? You tell me. A man checks into the South Point Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. He applies for a job on a clean up crew and during his first week, finds a dead body of an independently wealthy man in one of the rooms and decides to use the man's identity to stay at the hotel indefinitely. He eats scraps from the buffet, works out in the hotel's pool, and never leaves the hotel. When he's not cleaning up other rooms, he's designing a building. One day, one of the front desk staff finds out that he is living off the dead man's credit cards and wants to know who he really is. He's a draftsman who lost his job, felt like he had disgraced his family, and decided to leave until he could come back with some sense of how to save them. Pretty twisted plan, no? The idea was to design a building that would get him rehired at his old firm, with an apartment on the top floor that would be his family's new home. Finally, the front desk person forces the draftsman to leave, after a year of solitude, to return to his family.

So, which pitch should I swing at?