I’m also a graduate of the New York Film Academy. In one of my Directing for Film classes, our instructor offered the greatest advice I’ve ever heard on how to become a filmmaker.
“Make a film.”
How do you become something? You just do it. Want to be a filmmaker? Make a film. Want to be an actor? Act. Want to be an author? Write a book. You don’t need permission, you need self affirmation. If you’ve made a film, you’re a filmmaker. If you’ve acted, you’re an actor. If you’ve written a book, you’re an author.
And I’ve written a book.
The distinction usually lies in being a professional. But you can’t be a professional anything without being an amateur first. If the goal is to be a professional author, then I’ve pulled off half that title already. I didn’t think I’d ever be here though, asking people to buy my book.
A little over ten years ago, I graduated from NYFA and was convinced I would do nothing but make films. And I did. I wrote and directed a lot of shorts, and we even made a feature called Being From Another Planet.
After BFAP (as it affectionately came to be known) was finished, I started the next big thing. It was going to be a web-series. It was going to be five seasons long. I wasn’t going to know how to pull off about half of it. It was going to be a scifi/thriller show. And unlike other mystery shows that tend to just make it up as they go, and the mystery suffers for it, I had a plan to keep the show as cohesive and well thought out as possible.
I was going to write the script for every single episode from season 1 to the series finale before we shot a single frame.
Over the course of three years, the story was a page long treatment, then a thirty page outline, then an almost 400 page screenplay, comprised of five seasons, each seven episodes long. Then a Stranger Things style miniseries of six one hour long episodes. I was eager to get started. I made teasers, I talked about it at film festivals, I even designed the opening credits.
Then the craziest thing happened.
People without kids may not realize how, when you do have kids, the idea of free time is as foreign as an extra thumb growing out of your knee. The amount of time I had to shoot a 35 episode mini series, or get it cast, or scout locations, or search for funding, had effectively dropped to negative zero.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter more than anything. I gladly give up my time. (Mostly.) But there this 400 page script sat for two years, just collecting dust. It felt so unresolved. And everyday I did nothing with it, I was scared that someone else would make a movie that was so similar to it, that it seemed I copied it, and I’d have to just throw the whole thing away.
Then The Nerdist announced they were partnering with Inkshares to give unknown authors a shot at glory. And I thought, I don’t need a crew, or a cast, or locations, or a budget to turn this screenplay into a novel. I just need Microsoft Word.
And thus, Blue Water began the journey from a 35 episode miniseries, to a 35 chapter novel.
I submitted Blue Water immediately, before I had even written page one. The screenplay was on its third draft, and so I felt like there was a pretty solid foundation to transition it to novel form. Each episode had an arc and ended at a tension point to make the viewers tune in next week. It seemed that it would naturally transcribe into chapter points.
So I immediately knew that the novel would have 35 chapters, what each chapter would be about, how the character progressed from beginning to middle to end, I even knew the very last words in the book before I really knew the first. Each “season” would translate to a “part” of the book. It was mapped out beautifully.
I finished the first draft from page 1 to page 351 in twenty nine days.
How to make an interesting female protagonist:
1.) Make an interesting protagonist.
2.) Instead of using the pronoun “he,” go with “she.”
Early on, before I even came up with the idea for Blue Water, I really wanted my next film to have a female main character. When I had read about the Bechdel Test, it blew my mind that the test set such a low bar (Have two female characters talk to each other about something other than a man), and yet so many films and novels failed it.
Then I reviewed my own work. And without even realizing I was perpetuating a terrible cycle, only a single film I had made, short or feature, had barely passed. That's embarrassing. That had to change.
Even in screenplay form, Emily Hunter is the most complex character I’ve ever created. When I first sat down to write Blue Water I thought it would make sense to write out her history. Everything that had happened to her to make her who she was. Stuff that wouldn’t be in the show, or the novel, but the stuff that would help me understand who she was so that she would make sense.
That character history ended up being about thirty pages long. And one of the more interesting things about Emily is that for a large section of her life, even she acknowledges that she doesn’t know why she does the things she does as she’s doing them. She’s frustrated with her life, she acts out, she hurts people she cares about, she hates herself. She’s got a terrible past, one full of moments that haunt her, that have sadly defined her. It’s her fault her parents divorced. That is part of her. It’s her fault her father couldn’t handle her. She was a burden to her mother, and she thinks the only reason her mother was there at all is because there was no place else to go.
And apart from all that, she’s misunderstood. She's living her life under the stigma of mental illness, not in a cartoonish, cliche way, but in the way millions of real people do everyday. She’s lived with a truth that no one else will hear. No one can wear her shoes, and she knows no one has ever wanted to really try. She feels worthless, broken, and yet, somehow special in her isolation. She wants to be so much more, she wants to be seen as a capable human, and she knows she never will be.
All of her past experiences built her into who she has become. Not a sex object, not a damsel, not a victim, but a real person who sometimes needs help, who is sometimes in danger, and who is sometimes unsure of what to do about it. But she has the power to make her choices, for better or worse, on how she survives.
Forgive the pun, but there is a method to her madness.
I hope when you all get to meet her, you think as much of her as I do.
Emily Hunter is a woman suffering. We meet her at 35, making strides at independent living after being mandated to live in residential psychiatric care for a good portion of her adult life. Now, holding down a third shift job, taking her medication regularly, and meeting with her therapist and case manger Dr. Meghan Harper twice a week, she's finally got her feet underneath her. But soon, she realizes that's the only point where the rug can be pulled out from under you.
After BFAP (as it affectionately came to be known) was finished, I started the next big thing. It was going to be a web-series. It was going to be five seasons long. I wasn’t going to know how to pull off about half of it. It was going to be a scifi/thriller show. And unlike other mystery shows that tend to just make it up as they go, and the mystery suffers for it, I had a plan to keep the show as cohesive and well thought out as possible.
I was going to write the script for every single episode from season 1 to the series finale before we shot a single frame.
Over the course of three years, the story was a page long treatment, then a thirty page outline, then an almost 400 page screenplay, comprised of five seasons, each seven episodes long. Then a Stranger Things style miniseries of six one hour long episodes. I was eager to get started. I made teasers, I talked about it at film festivals, I even designed the opening credits.
Then the craziest thing happened.
People without kids may not realize how, when you do have kids, the idea of free time is as foreign as an extra thumb growing out of your knee. The amount of time I had to shoot a 35 episode mini series, or get it cast, or scout locations, or search for funding, had effectively dropped to negative zero.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter more than anything. I gladly give up my time. (Mostly.) But there this 400 page script sat for two years, just collecting dust. It felt so unresolved. And everyday I did nothing with it, I was scared that someone else would make a movie that was so similar to it, that it seemed I copied it, and I’d have to just throw the whole thing away.
Then The Nerdist announced they were partnering with Inkshares to give unknown authors a shot at glory. And I thought, I don’t need a crew, or a cast, or locations, or a budget to turn this screenplay into a novel. I just need Microsoft Word.
And thus, Blue Water began the journey from a 35 episode miniseries, to a 35 chapter novel.
I submitted Blue Water immediately, before I had even written page one. The screenplay was on its third draft, and so I felt like there was a pretty solid foundation to transition it to novel form. Each episode had an arc and ended at a tension point to make the viewers tune in next week. It seemed that it would naturally transcribe into chapter points.
So I immediately knew that the novel would have 35 chapters, what each chapter would be about, how the character progressed from beginning to middle to end, I even knew the very last words in the book before I really knew the first. Each “season” would translate to a “part” of the book. It was mapped out beautifully.
I finished the first draft from page 1 to page 351 in twenty nine days.
How to make an interesting female protagonist:
1.) Make an interesting protagonist.
2.) Instead of using the pronoun “he,” go with “she.”
Early on, before I even came up with the idea for Blue Water, I really wanted my next film to have a female main character. When I had read about the Bechdel Test, it blew my mind that the test set such a low bar (Have two female characters talk to each other about something other than a man), and yet so many films and novels failed it.
Then I reviewed my own work. And without even realizing I was perpetuating a terrible cycle, only a single film I had made, short or feature, had barely passed. That's embarrassing. That had to change.
Even in screenplay form, Emily Hunter is the most complex character I’ve ever created. When I first sat down to write Blue Water I thought it would make sense to write out her history. Everything that had happened to her to make her who she was. Stuff that wouldn’t be in the show, or the novel, but the stuff that would help me understand who she was so that she would make sense.
That character history ended up being about thirty pages long. And one of the more interesting things about Emily is that for a large section of her life, even she acknowledges that she doesn’t know why she does the things she does as she’s doing them. She’s frustrated with her life, she acts out, she hurts people she cares about, she hates herself. She’s got a terrible past, one full of moments that haunt her, that have sadly defined her. It’s her fault her parents divorced. That is part of her. It’s her fault her father couldn’t handle her. She was a burden to her mother, and she thinks the only reason her mother was there at all is because there was no place else to go.
And apart from all that, she’s misunderstood. She's living her life under the stigma of mental illness, not in a cartoonish, cliche way, but in the way millions of real people do everyday. She’s lived with a truth that no one else will hear. No one can wear her shoes, and she knows no one has ever wanted to really try. She feels worthless, broken, and yet, somehow special in her isolation. She wants to be so much more, she wants to be seen as a capable human, and she knows she never will be.
All of her past experiences built her into who she has become. Not a sex object, not a damsel, not a victim, but a real person who sometimes needs help, who is sometimes in danger, and who is sometimes unsure of what to do about it. But she has the power to make her choices, for better or worse, on how she survives.
Forgive the pun, but there is a method to her madness.
I hope when you all get to meet her, you think as much of her as I do.
Amongst her frequent delusions is a hallucination of a little girl in purple pajamas that Emily has come to call "Carrot." At various times, Emily has believed that Carrot was real, and that she needed Emily to help her. Her visions of this child have always been strong and surreal. Now they're getting too powerful to ignore. Carrot is guiding Emily. But to what end?
Now, determined to find the answers, Emily starts down a path she may never return from. She destroys her medication, and any progress she's made, and follows Carrot into madness.
And she'll have to save us all.
Blue Water has been a story I've been desperate to share with the world in one form or another for almost six years. The novel is complete, currently residing in its seventh draft. I'm incredibly proud of the book. What I love most of all is how quickly the story changes. Everyone who has read it has had that moment of thinking they knew where the story was headed, only to find mere pages later they were miles away. This is the same feeling Emily has throughout the events of Blue Water. I'm tight lipped about giving any spoilers away beyond what I've said so far, and those spoilers are basically for Chapter 6. If I were to try to explain what Chapter 13 is about, you'd think I was talking about a different book. All the stuff I've ever hinted at all happen before page 50. There's three hundred to go at that point, and the story never slows down.
I'm so excited for you to read this. I need you to read this.
As of this writing, the book is less than 45 orders away from being picked up by Inkshares Quill collection. Less than 45 to go to publication. I need your help to cross the finish line.
If you would like to pre-order Blue Water and get us closer to publication, please visit our Inkshares Page and snag your copy starting at just $10.
If you would like to read the first four chapters, they are currently available here.
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