Pirates, Rock Stars and Screenwriting

I'm feverishly writing a story about a pirate and a blind psychic falling in love.
It's called Moody & The Ghost and will be a mystery series as well as using the first book for a tv script to pitch to producers.

Moody is Bryndle Moody, a paranormal investigator, with a successful You Tube show who loses her sight and her husband in a tragic accident. When she discovers she's also lost her ability to communicate with ghosts, all seems lost. But she mysteriously inherits a haunted house on the Oregon Coast and finds she can see in the presence of the ghost--a dashing smuggler from the 1850's who wants her to solve his murder.


The book's rough draft is half way done, she says as she writes about writing the book instead of working on the actual book. The spec pilot is done at 55 pages of mostly dialogue and action and I'll be pitching this show to producers later this week at Connecting Writers to Hollywood, an event in Washington State to allow writers to meet and pitch to some Hollywood heavy weights who buy stories to produce.

I'm excited. I might wear a pirate costume.
Probably not, but wouldn't that be fun, to show up in a pirate costume! I bet Hollywood hates that kind of schtick.

I'm pitching it as an hour long drama with supernatural elements and romance possibilities. I hope there isn't something exactly like it out there already but one never knows. I'm saying it's Happily Ever After meets The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. I'm hoping the producers are old enough to know how popular that last show was when I was a kid.


If they look like they're going to sleep, I'll move on to my other project, Necessary Detour. It is the story of a rock star hiding at a remote lake house from a psychotic stalker and the media after announcing her retirement from show business, who can't stop spying on the people across the bay, to save her own life.
I've mapped that book out as a 5-part limited series for distribution. Like Big, Little Lies. I'm sure I'm the only author who's taken her suspense novel, turned it into a mini-series and is shopping it after the mega success of Liane Moriarty's book. NOT.

Be thinking of me Saturday (all day please) as I pitch my projects to several producers in hopes of some interest in Mood &The Ghost and Necessary Detour.

The first book will be out late July and I'll shout that launch from the rooftops!

Go for the Gusto in 2018!

Have you made any?
You know...resolutions?
Did you follow through with last year's resolutions? Do you remember what they were? I don't remember mine.
But, that won't stop me from taking stock of the year and plunging into 2018 with gumption and vigor. I am an optimist. And a dreamer.

Sometimes I get caught up in an idea of the direction I want my life to turn, then remember I'm not 30 anymore. Or 40. Or 50.
 I can't take up a new career that will take years and years to learn and establish. I can't say "Writing for TV looks super interesting! I'm going to take that up!"

Or can I?

Seeing an offered course on January 11th on TV script writing, I thought about signing up, then asked myself why. Am I going to move to LA and write for TV?
Nope.
However, the adventurous side of me that likes to learn new skills wants to take on this challenge of learning to write TV scripts.
It's somewhere fun to go while I procrastinate about finishing my latest novel. And, while I wait for the film company who optioned my book series to be ready to start developing the first movie. I'm a producer on the movie and I really want to get started but sometimes I get ahead of myself and everyone else in enthusiasm and ideas, necessitating a spin around to find something to take on my excitement--channel that enthusiasm into something else until we start talking pre-production. Maybe I should take up screen writing, not TV writing, but the future seems to be in TV and short episodic entertainment, not feature films. Smaller screens, shorter scripts is what Hollywood says.

So, for my 2018 resolution, I vow to dive in to wherever life takes me, keep up the excitement, learn new skills, and not do any more of that self talk that I'm too old to do this or that because I need to start thinking about winding down soon.
I will not wind down.
Resistance is not futile.

Happy New Year Everyone! Go for the Gusto!