Start with Part 1.Then a weird thing happened. That January, a close friend of mine emailed me a link to some motivational speaker who wrote about letting your dream have a voice, no matter how crazy you think it is. I took it as a sign, and I emailed my friend about what was going on with me and this obsession. She was delighted! I thought maybe she was nuts. She told me to write down the episodes immediately and send them to her. Crap. I have to write it down, give the delusions life? I felt so guilty that I didn’t even tell the husband what I was doing. I just did it.

I wrote a script of the first episode, like a script for a play because that’s what I knew. I sent it to my friend. She told me another friend of hers was writing stuff for other characters too, except for the Harry Potter series, and it was called Fan Fiction. OK, that was all right with me. Maybe that’s what I was compelled to do. It would be an acceptable hobby, and I could return to reality. So I  found the fan fiction site for my show and did some reading. There was only one problem. These people were writing in story form, and I had written a script, and scripts aren’t allowed on fan fiction. So I was stuck again. I didn’t want to write in story form. In my head, it just felt wrong. So I did some more research on line, trying to desperately figure out what to do with this apparently unacceptable thing I had just created.

It turns out there is a term for what I made. It’s called a spec script, and TV writers make them all the time. Wow! Was I a TV writer? I got books from the library about it. It sent out the other three scripts that I had made, now to a couple of other friends. Finally, my husband, no longer zonked out on cold meds, confronted me with my secretive behavior and I had to come clean. Even he didn’t reject my idea. So I did more research. I also sent out a script to one of those TV writer contests.

So what happened? Nothing. The show I was so obsessed with has been off the air for a couple of years now. TV writing is an extremely exclusive club of very thick skinned people who live a  tenuous existence from season to season. If I were a doe-eyed twenty-two year old, ready to relocate my entire life to LA, maybe. You know what all the TV writers pretty much said? Write books. When my husband told everyone I wanted to be a writer, they all asked, “What book is she writing?”

I’m not sorry my brain went to TV scripts first. I learned a lot about the process, and I think it made me a better novel writer. And I’m not closing the door on the idea of writing for television someday. I even wrote a pilot with three episodes, and my friends love it. But for now, I’m writing books. For now, this is how I bravely expose my insanity to the world. Enjoy my crazy.

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