INT. SEATTLE KITCHEN – DAY

The timing for my book release was terrible. We were nine months into the plague and it was election day. I felt robbed. My launch event was me, in my home, on Zoom. I had been looking forward to a book tour with the in-person book signings and awkward Q&As; instead, I sat in front of my video camera, reading to my screen.

At one of these 2-D online events, the host, Amy Guth, asked me what I wanted to happen with my book. I knew the answer before she’d asked. “In a perfect world,” I said, “I’d get to make a movie or a Netflix series.”

“I’m so glad you said that,” she replied, “because I want to make a movie out of your book.”

I laughed and she stopped me.

“You don’t know this is what I do,” she said. “I’m serious. I want to work with you on this.”

I did not, in fact, know that Amy had been an indie filmmaker for many years. Until this point, I’d known her from Twitter as radio producer with a deep love for 80s music and a wry humor I appreciate. That was it.

“What the hell, there’s a pandemic and I need a project.” I thought, “I’ve had good luck with Twitter randos before. Worst case, I learn to write screenplays from a pro. That’ll be fun.”

In January 2022, we acquired the option to write a screenplay. This means you must pay the publisher for the right to explore what you might make from the book; while you’ve got the option, no one else can buy that right. I was annoyed by this process, it’s my book, goddammit, and in fact, when I negotiated my contract I tried to keep the film rights. I did not have an agent and did the best I could, but I did not win. We wrote the check.

“It’s okay,” Amy said, “This is a pretty good contract. Don’t stress. We’ll get it back in the movie budget.”

I’m sure I said nothing while thinking, “Sure, sure. Movie budget. Uh huh. Like that’s a thing.”

It took a few months for us to get rolling. Amy was busy, I was busy, plus, oh right, I did not how to write a screenplay. There were spreadsheets and draft documents and a hellish piece of software called Final Draft, an industry-standard tool for writing screenplays. I started watching movies with a completely different set of eyes. How did they tell that story with so little dialog? What did they do to get this particular quality of light? What is that young actress doing right now, today?

I would write scenes on Fridays, my day for things that are not the day job. Amy would write scenes when she had time. We put together this patchwork of moments, and one day, we’d checked off everything on the list. In the meantime, I’d started to pay closer attention to Amy’s social media. Here she is at a film festival, here’s a post about an award she’s won, here she is behind the camera, the producer on a shoot.

We spent three long days at my kitchen table writing, doing seat-of-the-pants research, reading, and revising. I had not worked this hard in some time. Sunday night, we went to dinner at a very good sushi restaurant. I confessed, not for the first time, that I have been in a state of suspended disbelief the entire time.

“We’re really doing, this, aren’t we?” I asked.

“You should think about what you want on your rider,” she said. “We’ll get a handler to look after your dog during those long days on set. I would not be here.”

“We haven’t worked together before. I don’t know how any of this works.”

“Fair. I don’t mess around. We are absolutely doing this.”

I’m not sure what’s next, but I do now believe my partner in this project is as serious as the 2016 election. We paid for dinner, went home, and Amy submitted us for a handful of screenplay awards.

The book release was hard. I poured myself into it, the writing, the pitching, the revising, only to look up and find a world in which I could not celebrate. It wasn’t a bad release; I sold out my advance right away but thanks to Covid, the opportunities I had to promote it, to get it seen were limited. Every now and then I’d meet someone, I’d get an email from someone who’d read it and liked it. Liked it a lot.

“Your book should be a movie,” they’d say, “it’s so good, it would work so well as a movie.”

You guys. It sure looks like my book is going to be a movie.