Since mid-2006 I have been developing and repeatedly rewriting a feature film project called Dorothy's Friends about a fashion designer based in San Francisco who turns 30 and realises that love and friendship have passed her by. Dorothy then sets out in search of finding love and dates three guys who turn out to be gay called Jake Straw, Rusty Silverman and Leo King. Along the way, Dorothy also struggles to accept her "wicked" stepmother Ellen West and meets a handsome Australian man from "Oz".At the core of this story is the belief and perspective that when you find that one special person in life you know you are meant to be with, "it feels like home" - and just like the original story, sometimes we don't see or appreciate what is right in front of us. It's a somewhat whimsical and lighthearted coming-of-age story about a modern-day Dorothy but with side stories involving people with familiar traits from the original story as they try to overcome their own struggles of intelligence, heart and courage. A particular subplot close to my heart involves Dorothy's new friend Leo, a closeted school teacher lacking the courage to be himself and how he works to overcome that in order to help one of his students who is being bullied.
Having been inspired by one of my readers recently who wrote and released an eBook called The Arrival online, I found it something of an epiphany or wake-up call that I don't need to keep waiting for someone to agree to make the movie before I can share my story with the world. It is amazing how far technology has brought us and how more power than ever is being given back to those in creative roles instead of gatekeepers. Content is now king and it really is an exciting time to be an artist whatever your chosen arena.
So I've decided to follow in the footsteps of Nicole MacDonald and adapt the film script I have written into a book as it's now working well, according to my story editor in the US. The subject matter of the story as a film is perhaps a little bit too edgy to go ahead and make without any evidence of an existing audience or underlying material so I found myself thinking "why not write the book and create that underlying material myself?"
After all, a film script is a pretty good blueprint to work from and adapting it into a book is just a case of building the house, plastering the walls and doing the interior decorating. You can even afford to lift up a few rugs in the house and see what you find underneath. In short, a novel format allows more room to explore characters and environments and really bring them to life than a film script does, but it is also a lot more work.
The idea of adapting this project or writing a book first floated through my head last year after I got one of the more amusing comments I've received since starting the blog. In relation to this post, someone told me that they likened me to a gay Carrie Bradshaw and I just sat there in a moment of stunned silence and said to myself "really??"
Contrary to what you might think, I don't have a Manolo Blahnik shoe fetish and if I were to write a column or a book like Carrie, I reckon it would probably need to have been called "No Sex in the City". So I can only conclude they were commenting on writing style rather than the subject matter.
By chance, I happened to catch the final episode of Sex and the City being repeated on TV the other week and found the words spoken by Carrie in the very final moments particularly poignant given what was on my mind at the time. It made me draw parallels between blog posts and how they can often feel like a date or a short-lived relationship in their own special way: "There are those that open you up to something new and exotic...those that are old and familiar...those that bring up lots of questions...those that bring you somewhere unexpected and those that bring you far from where you started. But the most exciting, challenging or significant relationship of all, is the one that you have with yourself..."
And in the very last line of that show, Carrie says it better than I think I ever could:
"...if you find someone to love the you, you love, well that's just fabulous...".
