Almost Famous?

Well, well, well—looks like I got me a screenwriter! But I suppose I should be considerate and begin at the beginning.

The fact is that Invictus, as I wrote it when I was fifteen, has sort of been my claim to fame, and so I was interviewed about it once or twice in the campus newspaper The D, once in the alumni newsletter, and once in The Valley News, a local newspaper. These interviews were also the first and only times I ever managed to be somewhat photogenic. Dartmouth being renowned for its wonderful alumni (to whom I owe my first “official newspaper” interview and this movie deal business), I was contacted by two alums who had read the article in the alumni newsletter. Turns out they were creative producers starting their own company and wanted to read some of my material to see if I had anything they might be interested in adapting to the screen. So I sent them Invictus, the Lucifer/Michael/Raphael stories from novel(s)-in progress “Stigmatized”/“Spiritualized,” and a short story “From the Disconnect.” I didn’t have much hope for the “Stigmatized” excerpt; I’d been gently let down by an agent about the manuscript, and we all know that “gently let down” can sometimes be a euphemism for “felled by rapid crushing blows to the kidneys and repeatedly kicked in the crotch once down.” Of course, a short story doesn’t have enough substance to become a movie and takes a lot more thought, time, effort, and caution. And I had even less faith in Invictus due to a misplaced and not-so-secret embarrassment… but come on, I’m justified. I wrote the thing 7 years ago; it reads nothing like what I write today. Which is fine; I’ve since come to terms with it, but every once in a while the feeling flares up and I don’t know what to think about it. Phalanx and Exodus will always be my babies and the characters who won me passage into the world of publishing, but they do date back to that insecure adolescent period that I really don’t like thinking about.

Anyway, so imagine my surprise when the producers—John ’99 and Jethro ’03—emailed me within days and gushed about Invictus for a full page. Then repeated themselves on the phone during the first conference call and repeated the sincere desire to turn the book into a “summer blockbuster.” Now I’m not one to get my hopes up, especially about something as uncertain as a movie deal offer, but I agreed to talk it out with them. One conference call later, they’d come up with a whole bunch of ideas and a possible screenwriter. Asked me if I wanted to write the screenplay myself, and when I demurred, they insisted I be as involved as possible with the screenwriter they found. The woman’s name is Eileen and apparently she’s, in John’s words, “hot stuff” in the film world right now and just got through writing a screenplay for a movie called “Mirror World,” which is currently being pitched to Disney as a live-action film and to Pixar as an animated one.

Now to return to my original point: the third eagerly awaited conference call happened today, and Eileen not only agreed to work with me on adapting Invictus but expressed how “passionate” (in her words) she was about the novel. So, if I may come full circle, I now have a screenwriter.

Not like that makes any of this official but it means that John and Jethro are taking the next step, which will make it all more official. They’re going to contact my publishers this or next week and negotiate optioning the novel, after which—if everything goes smoothly—they’ll give Eileen the go-ahead to start writing the outline for the adaptation. From there, the writing/adapting continues until everyone’s satisfied, and—provided everyone is satisfied—then the script gets pitched to producers and studios. Only after the studio agrees to finance the project does it become really official. So my paranoia that the whole deal might fall through will have me slightly on edge until that happens.

All in all, a good ending to a fairly decent day. I never did get around to getting that new cell phone or the external hard drive I’m hankering after. In other news, I have to mow the jungle that is our backyard tomorrow. Went outside to survey the fenced-in wilderness and inadvertently nudged a fallen branch with my toe. It is testimony to the ups-and-downs balance of my life that the patio instantly began swarming with recluses. Did you know that a bite can cause tissue decay as large as the span of your hand?

Movie deal or no, I swear as long as I’m in this house, I am never sleeping peacefully again.

Surrendering With Grace

By which I mean to say I’m not kicking and screaming this time around. Nope, this time I’m in the online game for good, as can be proven by the solid logic I provide below:

1. Inertia. I am living proof of the theorem that the human body, left to its own devices, naturally tends towards a state of laziness, however pressing the deadline or dire the consequence.

2. Too many people send me emails and letters wanting to know about the humdrum that comprises my day/week/past summer/entire lifetime. The result: overwhelmed by the sheer volume of mail in my inbox, I drop out of sight in a classic Deer in Headlights maneuver, inspiring aforementioned mailers to send even more mail demanding to know why they haven’t heard from me. It’s a damn vicious cycle, let me tell you.

3. As many of you know, despite the fact that I still hunt-and-peck using only my index fingers, my typing speed is something around 80-90 words per minute despite my chronic tendonitis (carpal tunnel, anyone?).

Now, I’ll give you a moment to finish your gasps of shocked amazement. I’m sure many of you would consider this and then ask incredulously, “But Vy—why is that a problem at all? You could hammer out pages of emails in minutes!” And I would mull over your question thoughtfully and politely inform you that I am finally teaching myself how to type properly using home-row keys, both hands, all fingers, and that my WPM has dropped to about 50. Then I would probably utter a scream of despair and throw myself off the nearest cliff. Losing speed in typing must be a writer’s worst nightmare. Or one of many nightmares. Hm. There’s a thought for a future post.

4. I am insomniac. Also, I am violently allergic to productivity and staying on top of things, which I proved beyond all doubt by getting most of my undergraduate work done a day or two before the deadline—except for my undergraduate thesis, which took maybe a week of writing and revising if you add all the time together. Still managed to turn it in right before the deadline though. So I look for excuses to procrastinate, the upshot of this tangent being that a blog should provide ample opportunity for procrastination.

5. In conclusion, I lack the speed, willpower, and wrist stability to write a response to each and every darling friend who sends me mail. So they’ll have to settle for this poorly written, soon to probably be poorly updated blog.

So in short, it looks like I'm stuck with this, much as I hate jumping on the bandwagon. The only thing worse than jumping on the bandwagon is jumping last, or maybe altogether missing the sawdust lining of that godforsaken creaking cart and landing on your ass in the churned mud turned up by the wooden wheels. It’s a pretty close call in my opinion. Anyway, chances are this won’t last too long either, but I’ll give it my best shot. The change of environment and the fear of grad school may just force me to stick with it.

Today I put my sister on the plane to UVA for her sophomore year after packing both of her suitcases without a working weighing scale in the house. 50 lb cutoff—and I packed both to 48.5 lbs exactly. By feel alone. I am a god. Also a little insane and OCD when it comes to packing. I don’t leave for another two weeks and I’m already mentally throwing clothes into my suitcases. But I suppose as a writer I can afford the extra eccentricity.

Speaking of, in two days I have my third conference call with John and Jethro, the Dartmouth alums-turned-movie producers who are looking into turning my first novel Invictus into a (and I quote verbatim) “summer blockbuster.” They found a potential screenwriter—I think her name’s Eileen—to work with me on adapting the novel into a movie; she’ll probably be in on that call too. I’ve managed to put it all out of my mind while my sister was home, but now that she’s gone back to college, I’m getting butterflies all over again. Telephones terrify me. Big future-making career-creating opportunities terrify me.

I’m really going to have to get over myself one day, but currently I’m still trying to figure out this typing-with-two-hands thing. My index fingers are most unhappy with this new arrangement, being the erstwhile dominant digits. They don’t seem to like being demoted from their Most Holy and Essential Post as Vy’s Typing Instruments.

In other news, the summer reading list went reasonably well, considering that I didn’t really expect to get through it. Finished the new Harry Potter book recently and wasn’t really satisfied, though I haven’t been since the fourth one, but I guess I’m picky. Her changing tone as the series moves to its close makes me wonder about the target audience, but that’s neither here nor there. Unexpected page-turner: Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane. Beautifully crafted family story from the POV of a boy as he grows up and tries to make sense of family secrets in the midst of Ireland’s internal political/religious strife. Also finished The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which has made me a lot more appreciative of some freedoms and a lot more suspicious of others, not to mention just more paranoid in general. And I subsist on atmospheric, groundless paranoia, particularly in the form of X-Files reruns and urban legends. On my side-table right now are Siddartha, Nine, Novena, and The God of Small Things, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while. I need to get all my pleasure reading done well before I fly out to grad school on August 26. Four classes all in fiction-writing + job + (hopefully) an internship = no free time for anything but class reading and writing. Not that I’m complaining; the book lists are unusually good. But more on that later; I think I’ll save the descriptions of classes and discussion of grad school expectations later.

Well, my wrists hurt and my insomnia seems to be wearing down, so I think I’ll give it a rest for now and lull myself to sleep with a couple of B horror movies and early morning cartoons. All in all, not a bad start here though. But knowing me, I predict the volume of these posts to begin dwindling beginning tomorrow.