Make A Wish

Make a wish they said when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake. But I knew my wish would never come true because of the manipulative and restrictive ways of my Guardian. Anything I had aspired to do, she had to say no to for some stupid reason. I wanted to be an air traffic control officer—no; I wanted to be an auto mechanic, oh, that's a man's job, she said. I wanted to be a horse trainer—those jobs are not for women, she would say.

So, in secret, I became the best screenwriter I could be. I would go to the library. and she had me call her as soon as I got there. I would check out the books I wanted and come right home. I had to check out books that would be for feminine jobs, just to cover books for screenwriting. To her, using your imagination for creative writing was a form of lying. Found out later on, she was one of the best liars I knew. Looking back on it, at the time I couldn't imagine why she acted the way she did.

Anyway, I'm losing track, back to what I was saying. It didn't take me long to realize the format needed, and how to write the storylines. I took my secret library books with me everywhere in my satchel. And so the writing began when I was 15. For school, we had to write poetry, and write in journals in any form of creative writing. The screenwriting started with whatever shows were on television at the time Magnum PI, Riptide, Blue Thunder, even Battlestar Galactica, all of my favorites. My script writing comes naturally to me, I don't write in normal manuscript format or story format, at least I didn't at the time, and it’s not my natural form of writing. Even now I’m using a speech to text writer to write this because one, I am driving and two, that format does not come to me easily.

I had befriended two guys in LA that became my mentors and are now my best friends and have been for over 30 years. I started writing to them and then when I was 13, I started writing storylines and sent them to them to see what they thought. I guess they thought that it was pretty good, because they pitched them to the producers, and it got produced, but not under my name, because I was under 18, and not allowed to be a member of The Writers Guild. But they would send me back the official working script as it was used and a stipend, which they didn't have to do, I guess because they recognized great talent, in their words.

To be doing professional screenwriting, I wanted to live in Los Angeles, and I did for about a year-and-a-half. Yes, I had taken my scripts and copies with me, but when I returned I guess I didn't hide them well enough. I didn't keep them with me at all times.

In school in English class, we were told to keep journals, a daily diary, which was filled with poems, which of course was creative writing. I guess I may have slipped up, and somehow she found them. Four years worth of notebooks filled with my poetry, along with the copies of the scripts that I had sent to LA, and had produced, she burned them all in front of me. I didn't speak to her for at least six months; I basically treated her like she didn't exist, because of the way she treated me and my creative writing. She was the kind of person who thought it was out of the question to watch anything good on television besides the news. The only way I knew how to watch the shows that I wrote for was to buy a little television set, which I kept very well hidden, more so than my stories. I waited until she went to bed at night, usually around eight PM, I had a headset plugged in, and was able to enjoy Star Trek, Knight Rider, Riptide, and the others.

Writing didn't stop there, my muse could have left permanently, but she returned when Star Trek: Voyager asked for submissions from its viewers for the final episode. I'm happy to report that I wrote one, and got the letter back saying it was a properly formatted, beautifully written storyline, but they decided to take it a different direction. I guess my getting Voyager home was a little too metaphysical for lack of a better word. But I was happy to have that second place letter framed and hanging in my room. And as life would have it, I got married, had kids, and my writing took another back seat. But things don't always end the way you think they will. Married life with my first husband came to a close, because of the emotional abuse, and I dove back into my writing again. I was going to do an autobiographical movie about life with my guardian, but it seems that the closer you are the to the subject matter, it brings up all those emotions that you've had to push down for so long, and makes it near to Impossible. But for me, it's actually a source of information, and I have turned it into a positive, and a source of strength for cross-genre television series.

My muse decided to wake up back in last August of 2018, and came back in full force. Stories exploded in my mind. it's been hard to capture those stories, I wish there was a pause button for my brain for what I see, the only way I can describe it: watching the show on a screen in my head. At the time she gave me 15 storylines for a UK drama series, which has expanded to 30 storylines. She has also given me the ability to write no matter what the subject matter is now. When I started writing again in August I made a professional account on Twitter and Instagram, and followed my favorite shows, and by the next day, they were following me. By the end of that week, most of the actors were following me, a couple of them found me on Facebook and friended me and we talk once or twice a week. They noticed on my biography on Facebook that I'm a screenwriter. So they asked me what I've written, and to see a sample, so what do I do, I send them the first episode of the free episodes sets that I'm writing now for the UK drama series that they're in. They read it, about 30 minutes later they come back and say how it's properly formatted, and it was a fun read, and they look forward to actually acting it out. There's no better feeling than having the validation of that in the show. One of the actors is also a short film producer working on another project not related to the show when he says that they're having an issue with a scene that shouldn't be more than five minutes long, but it's actually 15 minutes long, and could I take a look at it and see how to fix it. That validates everything I've gone through, showing that my talent is being noticed.

So in some ways, I do feel like a phoenix, with my past works having been burned, rising from those ashes, and actually have my writing noticed. With the short story, writing prompts I've been given, and entering the contests. I could not even have imagined taking the short stories, writing them in story format, then turning them into a script, and having them be accepted by the Carolina Film Community for short film production. It's indescribable how good that makes you feel, knowing what has gone on in the past. So I guess wishes do sometimes come true, and take a little longer than you expected, but if you keep going, and keep working towards it, it can come true. Advice to all those that think they can't get something done for one excuse or another: don't you dare give up, because it is well worth it, and when it comes true, it is that much sweeter.