Old Stories, Blockbuster, and People

Around a decade ago, I worked on a screenplay about two guys who used to work at a video store. The story was a way for me to work through some of my own unresolved feelings of a life that didn't live up to my own expectations. Of course, through the story, the character learns it's not the past that he wants to revisit, it's how he felt in the past that he misses the most. I never could land the ending. I kept trying to make it work, but the whole project really needed to be started over and I just didn't have it in me. Plus, I had no intention on making the film, I just needed a creative outlet to work through some emotions. Recently, I decided to adapt that screenplay into a novella. I deleted it a long time ago, but I remember the key scenes, jokes, characters, and I plugged it all into AI to help me reorganize the story and begin to re-arrange things and flesh it out. It's been an absolute blast to work on, and while it's far from done, it's lead me to confront some of those same…