On a ordinary Wednesday morning I find myself standing in my shower wondering what I should wear to Jane’s funeral. Now that’s weird. There isn’t any Jane that I know of, other than the ill-fated woman I wrote about nine years ago.
Sometimes writing a book is a carefully planned, thoughtfully plotted, neatly organized endeavor. Other times, (ask any writer) it’s a willy-nilly, I wonder what’s coming next sort of thing. That’s the way it was with this novel. Totally willy-nilly.
One night, on a whim, I keyed in the first few sentences on the computer. Liked how it sounded so I just kept on writing. And then in the first paragraph, Jane shows up. “Dear-old-anything-but-plain Jane” says the yet to be named narrator. By the end of the first chapter Jane has announced her reason for coming to visit. She is going to die, and she needs to say goodbye to her best friend, Ida Mae, and the life she left behind many years before.
Nobody is more surprised by this announcement than I am. I’m just playing…conjuring up a pretty scene between two friends. No plot intended. I finish the chapter, and go to bed wondering where this turn of events will take me now.
After that, Jane and Ida Mae consume my life.
Days I rush through my work mindlessly, the gotta get it done today stuff so that I can get to the real work. Writing the story. I don’t call it a novel, because I don’t know that it is. Yet. The scenes unfold on the monitor before me, the characters reveal themselves to me through the pages of Ida Mae’s diary. The small Ohio town, the charming Victorian house, rooms filled with family history all appear and I must rush to get the words out of my head and onto the page before they slip away.
Nights are filled with a tumble of sentences, whole chapters write themselves in my head as I lay in bed. The title appears; Ida Mae Tutweiler and the Traveling Tea Party. Hmmmm. Wonder how I’m going to explain a traveling tea party. I haven’t a clue. Funny thing is, the late night imaginings stay in place. Crisp and clear in my mind for the next day’s work. What fun!
And then it’s finished. Jane dies, Ida Mae goes on. I’m tired and empty. But also happy. It’s been exciting. I’ve been writing for a long time, but this is different. I like what I’ve done.
Now the tedious work begins. Trying to find a publisher is not like trying to find a needle in a haystack because finding a needle in a heap of hay would be a whole lot easier. There are only a few thousand publishers, maybe, and millions of wanna-be books all scrambling for their attention.
Ask any writer. It ain’t easy. But I get lucky, find a small press and suddenly my manuscript is a book. For sale in stores everywhere.
Then the miracle began… unexpected and certainly unforeseen. A friend sent the book to a young man in Hollywood who claimed to be a manager for writers and scriptwriters. He loved the book, and found a screenwriter to turn it into a screenplay. She re-wrote my story to fit her vision, and of course, that upset me to no end…what was the matter with it the way it was??? But that’s Hollywood. It’s a very rare book that doesn’t get changed in a screen play. I’m sure there’s perfectly good reasons for that , and the truth is, if it hadn’t been for Darrell Orm’s unfaltering persistence for eight long years I wouldn’t be sitting here today, would I? It was her work, and her words that got us to the screen. I’ll always be deeply grateful for to her!
The manager disappeared from the scene but Darrell refused to give up, and sure enough, finally the script got into the hands of a producer at Hallmark. The rest is history. Contracts all around, I get a screen credit and a nice check and plan a trip to Hollywood. That’s on another planet in case you didn’t already know. And the producers say, “Sure, you’re welcome to come watch the filming. We’d love to meet you!”
Wow.
It’s May, my birthday month, and we are going to be there on my 77th birthday. I don’t know about you, in a lot of ways I’m happy to be this old, it’s fun. But in other ways I’m not a bit pleased about it. It’s so dammed old. Even so, on the very day I celebrate my birth all those years ago I’m going to be there to watch the filming of my book. It’s now being called The Glass Seagull.
Wow again.
We drive for hours across half of California it seems, to a remote ranch deep deep deep in the desert mountains of Simi Valley. The “studio” is at the end of a fifteen mile long dirt road, rocky and rutted, no signs of life to be seen along the way. Every once in a while we come to a cattle guard that has a small green cardboard sign that says “glass” and a picture of a flying seagull. They sure don’t have a problem with paparazzi here I bet.
Finally we arrive at a big open area, lots of cars and big trailers parked in neat rows. Suddenly I am overwhelmed. It crashes over me like a big wave…they are here because of what I did one night. All of this is because I wrote that book. I see it and I hear it, but I can’t get my head around it. We are shown a teeny room in one of the trailers. It has my name on the door. It has a toilet, and a long bunk. But no star. Oh well.
We are bussed up a steep hill to an old Victorian style house, long porch wrapped all around the outside and cameras, and sound booms, and lights the size of a small car, and people swarming around everywhere. The house, we are told, is the one used in the TV series “Little House On the Prairie,” how neat is that?
It’s hotter than hell, but we are graciously welcomed, introduced to the director (a crusty and charming old Texan) the cast and the crew, offered cold water and instructed to sit on the back part of the porch and stay quiet when they yell quiet. I meet Timothy Bottom, he plays the part of Ida’s (the Mae has been dropped) husband or boyfriend or something…I’m not quite sure. We have a lovely chat, he tells me all about his impending divorce, I sympathize and then he asks me about the book. In fact, when I am introduced to anyone, it’s always as “the author” which is greeted with warm enthusiasm.
I’m having a ball…sweating like a pig, but happy and delighted and astounded to find myself in the big middle of all this. The director puts us in the kitchen scene, me, my daughter Biz, my hostess Amrita and her daughter Nikki. We have to stand there and pretend we are eating and talking at Jane’s wake. If it doesn’t get cut we’ll be in the thing. We shoot the scene two or three times, I really can’t remember.
Then it happens. The high point of my life. The director yells from the living room, “Get Gin in here, I want her in here!” Holy smoke! He’s going to put me in another scene! I float in on a little cloud, and then, the next thing I know someone is standing in front of me with a huge cake and on the top is a picture of my novel and below the picture it says Happy Birthday Ginnie. Then the whole cast and crew sing Happy Birthday to me. Well, of course I cried. You’d have to be made of granite not to cry at a thing like that.
A little while later we leave. I know we drove back over that same dusty rocky path, and I guess it took as long to get home as it did to get there, but I honestly can’t say…I think I was in sort of a trance, the sound of those people singing to me still ringing in my ears, how this amazing adventure unfolded over the years…so slowly, almost invisibly over the years.
When I was a child, I wanted to grow up and be somebody, to make some sort of my own mark as an artist in the world. Then reality showed up on my doorstep, and informed me that my mark was to be a wife and a mother. I did the wife part far less than perfect, still, I’m happy to say, I have five wonderful children, and no mother is prouder of her kids than I am. And now, at long last, the artist has made her mark as well. In the grand scheme it’s a only teeny mark, but it’s there. And before it’s over, a million or more people will see what began in my head that night nine years ago.
Iʼm a writer, itʼs true, but I donʼt have the words to express how good that feels.
