Lou has a friend named “Henry.”
He’s this amazing guy that people can’t help but love — if they’re lucky enough to meet him. Henry is exciting, kind of allusive, and just a little naughty around the edges! I love Henry, and he always brings out the best in Lou. They can crack each other up so much, but there is a very deep respect for the gut instincts that these two share as honest to goodness streetwise entrepreneurs.
But Henry is a very private person, so I will keep my descriptions about him to a minimum. All you really need to know is that Lou and I love Henry very much.
When Lou finally gave up on making something work in Irvine, Henry offered Lou an opportunity. He asked Lou to consider stepping in to run a company he was taking public. It was going to be based where Henry lived (which was Salt Lake City, Utah), but Lou would need to spend a lot of time in New York City to help promote the stock.
At the time that Henry presented this opportunity to Lou, the company was just a shell corporation, and a lot of work needed to be done to do all of the proper filings, and to raise the capital they’d need to officially launch. But the ideas that Henry had for how to structure the company were exciting to Lou, and so Lou agreed to come on board.
But the timing was awful.
Lou and I were homeless again and in that terribly familiar state of needing a place to land. So Henry and his partner, “Jim,” decided they could build the company quicker if we relocated to Salt Lake before the company took in the first round of funding, and that way, “we” could help the guys write the investor deck. I really didn’t want to write for Lou or his next venture after everything we’d been through, but I also felt like I needed to get over myself and do what needed to be done to help get the company funded.
However, there was something else going on with me and my writing at that time. I’d had a tiny breakthrough of my own while we were floundering around in Orange County:
Someone in the entertainment industry noticed of me.
I had attended a meeting in LA, and seated across the table from me was a very beautiful man that I’m going to call “Roy.” I didn’t know who he was at that time, but it didn’t matter. When I smiled at him, I saw this beautiful soul looking back at me. Roy is the grandson of a music legend from the 1940’s, but he is also pretty famous in his own right as a rapper from the Bay Area.
At that first meeting, I noticed that Roy was calm, and he listened carefully to people when they spoke to him. I instantly admired this man because of how present he was. I think that’s a rare find in LA — especially when someone is a part of the entertainment world.
I ended up sitting next to Roy at the dinner that followed the meeting, and when he asked, I told him about my writing. I told him how important storytelling is to me, and I told him about the very personalized characters I’ve created for my novels. Roy smiled so brightly when I explained the premise of Hurricane Season — the novel I wrote about Eloise Butts, the 33-year-old virgin from South Beach. He laughed easily, and he asked me all of these amazing questions that created an awesome exchange between us.
Talking to Roy made me feel so understood. He reminded me of how much I love words, stories, and how magically imaginations can mix together to create a new world of possibilities for people to experience.
I never expected anything to come of having that exchange with Roy that night. I was just so happy to see myself show up in my own life again, and talking about storytelling with a spoken word artist awoke a hope that I had started to let die inside of me. But just before I started packing our belongings to load into our storage container, Roy called me.
He said he had an opportunity to present new content to a very prominent decision maker in the television world, and he wondered if I’d ever considered turning Hurricane Season into an original series. He explained how things work, and told me that to even dip my toe in the water, I’d need to write a pilot episode that set up the adaptation of my novel into a live action series.
Roy told me he felt like my voice was refreshing, and he thought a series about a virgin named Eloise Butts – who “wasn’t the butt of the joke” – was perfectly unique, and, he believed it was worth it for him to leverage his connections to see what we could do together.
I remember feeling dizzy after I got off the phone with Roy! I immediately sat down at my computer and started looking up tutorials on how to write a television pilot. With that one single phone call, I felt myself falling in love with writing again. My fingers felt itchy to get started, and my mind started to find a place of escape in the world of Eloise Butts all over again.
But the truth is, my reality was still way too messy to get completely lost in my writing process. My spirit animal, Juanita, was always scratching at my heart back then — believe me! So I only messed around a bit with trying to write a pilot. Scripts are so different from anything I’d ever written before, and I felt stuck a lot. But I wanted to keep trying.
So I came up with a little system.
I’d clean and pack our things for a few hours, and then reward myself with a few hours of writing. By the time our stuff was packed up and gone, and our SUV was loaded with everything we’d need to do another leg of imposing, I had written a wonky first draft of a pilot for my series.
I remember feeling heavy-hearted about my whole life, but there was this one shiny possibility in my awareness that gave me a twinkle of newfound hope. And, I think I’d discovered this new kind of coping mechanism where I could split my emotions between what was really happening in my life, and what I was hoping would happen for my character, Eloise.
Whenever things started to feel too sad or too scary in my real life, I’d just turn my thoughts to recreating a story that I already knew so intimately. Thinking about Eloise was my happy place.
