MUY FRIO

It's not just a vitamin drink, it's an adventure in a bottle, that explodes in your mouth.

“How do you know what to do next?” “Where do your ideas come from?” “How do I get an agent?” “I’m really worried, I have this producer who wants to read my script, but I’m worried they’ll steal my idea.” “Do I need to give my new agent ten percent if I had already sold something before I signed with them? I just need them to do the contract. I made the deal happen.” “I’m worried that with all that’s going on, the job of being a writer isn’t a sustainable career anymore. Fewer episodes per season, fewer shows, fewer pilot scripts, fewer movies, fewer…” “I’m worried!”

There’s a lot going on in the world. And it’s not just in my career as a writer. I bet whatever your job is, you can look around and wonder if it will be a job at all soon. And if you read (I bet you do, you’re reading this, right?). If you read the news, all the layoffs at all kinds of companies are about, “Setting up GIANTCO for success and sustainability beyond the next quarter.” GIANTCO is always thinking about the next quarter. That’s GIANTCO for you. The numbers of people losing jobs and opportunities can stagger you. I could write a thousand words easy about the snake of the economy eating itself. GIANTCO has to cut costs because there’s less demand for GIANTCO things, because people are out of work, can’t afford GIANTCO things, and GIANTCO has less customers, so it needs to layoff more people to cut costs because there’s EVEN less demand for… you get what I mean.

What if I told you that I had the answer to all of this? TO every question in the first paragraph. And maybe I had the answer to all the stuff going on in the second paragraph, too. Or most of it. What if I told you that while I was wearing one of those cool microphones that is just a small wire that goes along your cheek and wraps around your ear. And I was standing on a stage and made a tent with my fingers and looked over my glasses at the setting sun while screens behind me flashed the name MUY AMERICAN PRODUCTIONS and you could also buy my vitamin water MUY FRIO on the way out of the auditorium? I mean, if I have all the answers shouldn’t I be on stage and be able to sell a vitamin drink that competes with Jake and Logan Paul’s vitamin drink? They don’t have all the answers. I DO.

Let’s be clear: I do not have MUY FRIO on shelves. I do not own a suit tight enough to do a TED Talk in. I do not have the answers.

What I do have is something less sexy and way more annoying: a couple of principles that have kept me writing, kept me employed most of the time, and kept me from being completely eaten by GIANTCO and its cousins. Get ready, as King Ad Rock would say, “I’m dropping science while others are dropping English, whaaaaat?”

1. Write the story that you’d like to pick up the most and find today in the world.

2. Try and be the most exciting writer to yourself that you can be.

That’s it. That’s the whole seminar. No workbook. No QR code. No MUY FRIO. You don’t even need to validate your parking. You could have used a twenty minute loading zone and be back on the road. That’s the good news. The bad news is: those two sentences are harder to live than they are to read. But once you truly shift into them, every question that we started off in that anxiety- ridden first paragraph starts to feel less like a crisis.

Let’s unpack them.

1. Write the story you’d most want to find today

Not the story you used to want five years ago. Not the story you think the industry wants. Not the story you believe will strategically unlock some imaginary room.

Today. Right now. If you were exhausted and scrolling, or walking into a theater, or flipping through a streamer, looking at the new comic book rack, what is the one story that, if you stumbled on the logline, would make you sit down and go, “I want that so bad”?

That’s the story you should be writing. Hold up. Scroll up. Read all those questions from the beginning again. They should start looking different through that lens:

“How do you know what to do next?” Ask: What story would I be genuinely mad at the universe for not existing yet? Start there.

“Where do your ideas come from?” From what you’re hungry for and can’t find. From the gap between what you can buy and what you wish you could buy.

“I’m worried they’ll steal my idea.” Guess what? Hard to believe but there are people in show business who steal ideas. It’s not an untrue thing to disregard. Example? Guess who? Gary Marsh. It was my idea to double cast Selena Gomez in the pilot I was making along with another pilot they were eyeballing for her. I was there, I was in the room, I suggested it. I’m sure you can google interviews and things with Mr. Marsh taking credit for it.

Guess what also? So what. Now that you know it could happen, instead of finding ways to be afraid to share your idea, or your script, your mood board, etc. Say this, “Well, if this is my only idea, then I’m in bigger trouble than having someone pinch this one.” OR, “What can I do to make this idea so specific to me, to my passions, that it would be laughable if someone tried to take it and make it their idea without my involvement.” Spend time creating not worrying.

And the bigger fear: “Is being a writer even sustainable anymore?” Jobs come and go. The episode orders shrink. The AI press releases will keep dropping. You cannot control any of that.

You can control whether you’re spending your limited writing life chasing trends you don’t actually care about or building the one thing you’ll never get tired of: a body of work that, if you were just a viewer, you’d be grateful existed. I’ve shared pilot scripts here in this space that I care deeply about that didn’t get made. But that’s my body of work, and I let it speak for itself.

Is that a business plan? Not on its own. But it’s the only foundation that doesn’t rot immediately.

Because here’s the secret: the business doesn’t need “writers.” It needs stories. And the only leverage you ever really have is when you bring in a story that is so clearly alive, so undeniably you, that people in the system go, “I don’t know if I can sell this, but I don’t want someone else to be the one who does.”

2. Try and be the most exciting writer to yourself you can be

This sounds like a motivational poster. It’s not. When you say to yourself, “I want to be the most exciting writer to myself,” you’re making three quiet decisions:

1. I’m not going to be the safest writer in the room.

2. I’m not going to be the most pleasing writer to executives.

3. I’m not even going to always be the most hireable writer.

But when I read my own pages, am I a little surprised? A little scared? A little proud? Do I feel like I mentioned a few weeks back, like David Bowie, who said, “If your feet can touch the sand, then you aren’t far enough out into the creative ocean yet.”

Last week we talked about people loving audacity after it happens, not before. And here’s something nobody puts in the panel bios at the launch of the MUY FRIO vitamin drink. A huge part of this job is staying interested in your own work long enough to finish it. That’s the ballgame.

Being “the most exciting writer to yourself” looks like letting a scene go one step past what you think is allowed. Letting a character be messy and say selfish stuff and still be someone you want to watch win. Because you see yourself in that person. A messy person who still deserves to win. A human. Choosing a story problem you don’t know how to solve yet, so your brain must come alive to crack it. I’ve written about that, too. Writers my age now, who told me when I was a young writer, “There are three ways to do a jealousy story.” Ugh. I’ll never be that writer. What if we figure out a new way today?

DON’T BORE YOURSELF.

Does this answer: “How do I get an agent?” Not directly. But it answers the pre-question: Why should any agent care that you exist? An agent or a manager can’t invent that electricity for you. They can amplify it, aim it, protect it sometimes. But if your work feels like you were politely trying to pass a test, everybody can feel that. Including you, if you really pay attention to what’s going on inside you.

Being exciting to yourself also changes how you ride the waves of the industry. When seasons shrink, when staffing gets weird, when your “plan” dissolves…if the only measure of success you had was “Did I book a job?” then yeah, you will feel like a failure most of the time. If part of your measure is, “Am I more alive on the page this year than I was last year?” then no strike, no layoff, no executive re-org can fully take that away.

“Do I need to give my new agent ten percent if I sold it before they came on?”

Talk to the union. Talk to more than one writer. Understand what’s standard. But underneath that: if all you see an agent as is “the person who negotiates paperwork for the win I already got,” you’re playing the short game. The real question is: “Does this person see the same writer I see when I read my most exciting pages? Can they help build a future where I’m doing more of that?” If yes, you’re not haggling over one deal, you’re deciding on a partner.

“I’m worried that with all that’s going on, being a writer isn’t sustainable.”

It might not be sustainable in the way we were promised — the 22-episode network years, the steady ladder, the idea of “once you break in, you’re in.” But here’s the quiet truth: this was always an unstable job with brief pockets of stability. The difference now is we can see the instability more clearly because GIANTCO keeps sending press releases announcing they are acquiring ALMOSTGIANTCO and using their stuff instead of making new stuff with their money. The only sustainable part has ever been to keep making work you’re hungry to have exist. To keep trying to be the most exciting version of yourself on the page.

If I ever do end up on that stage with the cheek mic and the MUY FRIO, I’ll probably say some version of this: I don’t have the answers. What I have is a compass. It points to the stories that keep me up at night because they don’t exist yet. Then I’ll pull out a bottle of MUY FRIO and instead of drinking it, I’ll pour it on my head like I just won the god damn Super Bowl, toss the empty bottle into the crowd and run out of the room.

PS: Haven’t done one of these in a while. Below is a Joaquin Murrieta, standing in front of a mural of Joaquin Murrieta. That mural came down because the building is being rebuilt. I was wondering how that project was coming along, curious to see if it went back up or got lost into history, like so many things. Then my phone rang this week. It was Memo. He was working with the crew doing the restoration and wanted to reach out to me. He had read my book, “Blood and Gold: The Legend of Joaquin Murrieta,” and wanted to know if I knew about this mural. “Yeah, I do. In fact… “ and then he invited me to go check in on it, see how it’s doing and maybe help out on moving it to its new home. I’ll let you know how that goes, promise. Because I am —

THE MOST IMPORTANT CHICANO IN HOLLYWOOD THAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT.