How COVID-19 Inspired Me to Write A Screenplay

With the recent COVID-19 stay-at-home order, I’ve channeled part of my creative energy into writing an old science fiction screenplay titled Bob is Lost in Space, which I began writing many few years but never finished it. Once upon a time, my goal in life was to be a professional screenwriter, although I could never finish a screenplay to save my life. And I ultimately gave up that dream when I discovered a new identity, that of a ‘vagabonder’ or a ‘wanderer’, and I became someone who wanted to travel all over the world meet new people and learn different customs and culture norms instead of creating fake realities and sitting inside a house watching things that weren’t real. And so my new goal in life was to become a travel show host like Anthony Bourdain, who hosted the hit show Parts: Unknown before he took his own life.

Of course I never became an Anthony Bourdain, and I settled into a job at the University of Pennsylvania working as IT Tech Support technician. But I did continue writing on the side, just short abstract pieces with my Philadelphia writers’ group, nothing significant, and then March 2020 happened. COVID-19 filled all of our headlines and entire social media posts, and like all of you, it started to drive me crazy. I became anxious and I could feel myself slipping into depression since we were all isolated, and I needed to counter this so I decided to return back to my screenplay Bob is Lost in Space to give me an outlet, an alternative reality to help me get through such a trying time.

Anyways, I’m sharing with you the first 13 pages of that screenplay (link below), and my hope is that I provide you with some temporary relief as well. I hope to inspire you to start a new project or finish one you never completed, to just be weird and creative–because there’s never a right time to be weird or creative or do the thing you love, there’s only now.

-Kendall

Synopsis

Set 140 years in the future, a spaceship is traveling to an Earth-like exoplanet when it falls through a hole in space. The crew escapes in individual crafts and makes it through the portal before it collapses—except for one man, Bob, who gets stuck inside another universe. There, he discovers that our universe is being torn apart by highly powerful beings and it’s up to him to stop them.