2015 Dreams #1

Here I am, post Christmas, counting down the days to the end of the year. It's rather pleasant. There are a number of things I'm personally hopeful about for the coming year. In a lot of ways I've felt creatively on hold for the past couple of years. Not that I wasn't creating. I was. Always. Writing and writing. It's just that some projects never flew, some have been on hold, and some just took ages! I'll speak to each of these over the next few days, but here let me mention one.

For the past 12 years my first novel, Gabriel's Story, has been optioned for film by Redwave Films. They do independent films, small, intimate movies that they believe in and work hard to get made. One of them, The Full Monty, was a huge hit, but all of them are interesting films in their own right. The producer, Uberto Pasolini, has graciously renewed the option each December, hoping that the next year was the one the would see our movie go into production. Hasn't happened yet, but, having just renewed the option again, he promises me the chances are better than ever for this to be the year!

What's changed? A couple of things. One is that for the first time in years, both Uberto and the attached director, Alan Taylor, are anticipating a break in their busy schedules that Gabriel's Story might fit into. Alan has been attached since the beginning, but he's been busy with a career that's taken off. In addition to early independent films, he's done a ton of serious tv dramas - Game of Thrones, The Wire, The Sopranos, Rome, Homicide: Life on the Streets (just to name a few), and more recently he's become a blockbuster epic film director: the two Thor movies and the forthcoming Terminator Genisys.

Did I just write that? Thor... Thor... Terminator... Gabriel's Story? Really? Well, it's not as crazy as it seems. Alan's a terrific, diverse director that clearly likes making different kinds of films. He's also a terrific writer. I know this because I recently read the screenplay adaption of Gabriel's Story that he wrote! It's really quite good. I've read some other screenplay adaptions of my fiction before, but this one was the best. It's my story, and it's different, and the ways it's different all make sense to me, and all tell my story in an efficient way that also makes it Alan's story. What more could I ask?

So, the word is that Uberto is ready to go on this, and that Alan may just be ready to go once he's finished with Terminator post-production stuff. So... maybe 2015 is the year we get to work?

More things I'm feeling good about 2015 to come...