I've been writing for pay for 61 years. I started when I was eleven years old and wrote a poem that earned me $50 in the Archdiocese of Dubuque poetry competition. (Before you scoff, $50 in 1956 would be $500 today). Reeves Hall, the Editor of the Bulletin Journal & Conservative in my small Iowa hometown (Independence) asked my father, the bank president, "Would Connie want to write some interviews for us?" I think he thought it would be amusing to have a sixth-grader interviewing the man whose farm was at the center of the state or the young man (my English teacher's son) who had just built his own telescope.
Thankfully, none of these early interviews exist, as far as I know, although I can recite that poem from memory. [Relax: I won't. Still, I was only eleven, so cut me some slack.]
I went on to be Editor of the I-HYH, which was our high school newspaper and to work with Janet Haradon Daily as editor of our yearbook (*Full disclosure: Janet went on to become the World's Fifth Living Best-Selling Author, while I ended up in a small Illinois junior high school teaching 7th and 8th graders for 17 and 1/2 years for $5,280 my first year).
Through nominations by my high school English teachers, I was awarded a Ferner/Hearst Journalism Scholarship to the University of Iowa, a full-ride scholarship, as long as I remained a Journalism major. I also was awarded a Freshman Merit Scholarship given to the entering 5% of the freshman class.
While it was great to have this financial windfall, it also meant that my parents reneged on their promise to let me go to any university I wanted to attend, as long as I kept my grades high. (I was 2nd in my class until the Rowley High School closed and 5 students came in with straight "A's" from that country school. I had a "B+" in French. Rats. Third.)
So, I went off to the University of Iowa instead of my first choices (Stanford and/or the University of Washington) where I was miserable until my junior year, when I made my peace with being at Iowa by becoming an Old Gold Singer (a group now defunct) and taking writing classes alongside such future luminaries as John Irving (auditing the classes and using my 19 Journalism number to register).
In recent years, I wrote a short story entitled "Living in Hell" within a 3-book collection entitled "Hellfire & Damnation." (www.HellfireAndDamnationTheBook.com). It was not self-published, but was published by a small press in Rhode Island. The organizing principle was that each story represented one of the crimes or sins punished at each level of Hell in Dante's "Inferno." I do self-publish , today. I've had 5 small publishers and I have an agent who moves at the speed of a glacier.
In "Living in Hell" an 8-year-old boy with a strange paranormal power meets a serial killer at his birthday party. The boy (Tad McGreevy) has Tetrachromatic Super Vision, a real-life power. He is the protagonist in THE COLOR OF EVIL series, and his best friend is Stevie Scranton.
In real life, Tetrachromatic Super Vision means that the individual sees colors extremely vividly. There actually have been a few females found (in Wales) with this power, which is almost migraine-producing. You may have known someone who claims to "see auras" around others. That is what Tad McGreevy's power does to him, except with a very significant difference or twist.
When Tad meets someone with "the color of evil" (khaki in my 3 novels), later, at night, when asleep, he relives the crimes of the evil-doer in terrifyingly vivid detail. The problem is that he doesn't know if the crimes he is witnessing are happening now, happened years ago, or are about to occur. Every night for 53 nights in the story he wakes his disbelieving family with screams and tells them of the horrors he has witnessed. Not only do they tell him to forgetaboutit, they insist that he must not tell others of his strange power, for fear he will become a social outcast. Eventually, his dreams stop when the perpetrator (modeled on John Wayne Gacy, whose lawyer Sam Amirante I actually interviewed in person to gather details for my story) is caught.
Tad is removed from his class and home-schooled until he recovers from the PTSD he is experiencing, his parents telling others in town that he has mononucleosis. When he returns to his class, in 5th grade, he is fine, since Michael Clay, the clown at his 8th birthday party who traumatized him, has been locked up in the Fort Madison Penitentiary for years. But, as often happens, Michael Clay (aka, Pogo the Clown) escapes and, learning of Tad's power through a reporter's press leak, he believes that Tad can "see the future." Michael Clay decides that he must eliminate the young boy, who is now a high school junior and, for three books, the unreformed serial killer stalks the young boy.
After I wrote the story, I felt sorry for poor Tad, who ended up in a sanatorium and was nearly comatose by the end of "Living in Hell." I went back to the story and wrote Tad out of his predicament and into the first of a three-novel series entitled THE COLOR OF EVIL.
The second book in the series is RED IS FOR RAGE. The third book is KHAKI=KILLER. The 3-book series in e-book format was named Best Indie Book of the Year 2018 in the May/June issue of "Shelf Unbound" magazine. I went into a recording studio and recorded each book as an audio book, as well as releasing it in e-book and paperback formats on Amazon. I did what I could to publicize my good three-book series, including getting a decent Kirkus review for Book #3. But the money did not flow in, despite the quality of the books, and that remains true to this day. Every Tom, Dick and Harry has written a book, and if you don't have an entire team working around the clock to publicize your book, good luck to you! I tried e-book giveaways. I got reviews. I took the books on virtual tours. I even took one book on a national radio tour. I began blogging (www.WeeklyWilson.com) and joined Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter (@Connie_C_Wilson) and Instagram. I went to every bazaar or large gathering and would have sold books out of the trunk of my car. ( I should have worn a sandwich board saying, "Will write for food.")
As an independent author, publishing is one thing. Publicizing it is another. Although I paid the World's Best Cover Artist for this genre (Vincent Chong) to do wonderful covers for Books 2 and 3, I didn't have enough money left to advertise it properly. I still don't.
So, I had another Big Bright Idea. I would write a screenplay based on the series.
I got this idea after interviewing Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who are the screenwriters responsible for writing "A Quiet Place." The film had just premiered at SXSW in Austin (TX) on March 9th and I was covering the festival films for www.TheMovieBlog.com, for which I write, and for my own blog. Since I was asking Scott and Bryan mainly about our mutual hometown of the Quad Cities (they grew up in Bettendorf, where I had a business for 20 years), I ran the interview on my own little local blog, because I didn't think that the national movie blog would be as interested in what teachers had encouraged the duo in 7th grade, when they began working together. The IMDB blog named it one of the Recommended Readings for March 11th, so there was that!
As I interviewed the young men, knowing that they had gone to the University of Iowa, as I did, I asked them this:
"You two were film majors---right?"
"Oh, no. We were general studies majors."
"But you took film courses---right?"
"No, but we started working together in junior high school" and one of the two volunteered that he was shooting films with a camera when he was six! They also commented on how useful the Iowa writing courses had been.
I took a lot of writing courses at Iowa, and I've written since I was eleven years old, beginning with my hometown newspaper doing interviews. In my studies, at one time or another, I sat in on classes by and interviewed Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who was then teaching at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and audited classes by Nelson Algren(also an instructor at Iowa at the time). Yet these two Iowa grads and general studies majors had written a film screenplay that earned $400 million dollars while never having been Writers' Workshop students or even English majors. Let that sink in. I did.
I went home to our three-bedroom Austin house and told my husband, "I feel like a real underachiever." I've taught other people to write at 6 colleges or universities, but my own writing "career" has gone nowhere (and not fast).
I made up my mind to write a screenplay (I had had one short class in screenwriting in 2007) and posted a sign on the office room door that said "Do Not Disturb" and started in, but I had to write from midnight until 7 a.m., because I was covering other people's films all day, as I have since 1970. I was towed once and booted once, which cost me $99 for the "free" screening of "Lean On Pete.") I would get up at noon and start all over again, attending films, writing about films, and then writing my own film, based on the first novel in the trilogy I had completed, which won numerous awards. (Pinnacle award, E-lit, etc.).
I "bit" on an offer from a group called Voyage Media to hook me up with a Hollywood producer for advice. The producer (John Crye) had greenlighted "The Passion of the Christ," "Donnie Darko" and "Memento" when he was a reader for a large studio. Mr. Crye and I would have 3 one-hour sessions on the phone. He was to start directing a film after that, and I was to leave for Cancun with my family for Easter break, so I had to complete the screenplay in 3 weeks. I had not written a screenplay since 2007. He would require $500 an hour, in addition to the $97 that Voyage Media originally charged me.
The plot, however, was all within THE COLOR OF EVIL, and it was up to me to streamline it, cut out incidental characters and make it into a screenplay running approximately 100 pages long (one page = one minute on the screen).
I could "see" the film in my head. I could remember some (but not all) of the technical things necessary to format a screenplay (it had been 11 years, after all). I began.
In speaking with Mr. Crye, I said, "I think this should probably be a series, so that the second and third books' plots can be used." John discouraged me from that approach, suggesting that it would be better to write a feature film. "You can always write a second or third script to continue the series, like 'The Hunger Games' or "Divergent.'"
Since the only class I had taken (a short one at the Chicago Screenwriting School) was for writing a feature film, I capitulated to his suggestion and wrote a 97-page screenplay, scavenging bits and pieces from all three books. (After all, if you pay someone $500 an hour to be the "expert" guiding you, you should probably take their advice...right?)
Upon learning that I had "cribbed" plot points from all three books, Mr. Crye said, "You shouldn't use all the plot activity from all three books. Just focus on the first book." [There went 41 pages of screenplay and I had to start over to end my script in Week #2.]
So, I sat up all night (again) and wrote a second ending, which used a totally new plot device based on Facebook. I thought I was being clever with my Facebook-like plot feature, until I learned that Facebook didn't really get going until 2006. My novel was set from 2003 to 2005. It followed the activities of 6 friends who were classmates in Cedar Falls, Iowa, at the Laboratory School, known as Sky High (from the initials for the State College of Iowa, which was, at one time, the designation for the University of Northern Iowa.)
I had to focus on the primary actors in the first book and that meant dumping some of them, to (potentially) be picked up in future films. Again, I suggested that a serial approach, all the rage on Amazon and Netflix, would be the best way to go to make my efforts marketable, but, again, the "expert" vetoed my idea, insisting that I should write a feature film.
So, I did.
The very act of writing THREE different 40 page endings had taken me one week per ending, or three weeks. There was no time in either my schedule or Mr. Crye's to refine it, so I set about entering the script in competitions listed on a service known as Film Freeway. I did have my former instructor at the Chicago Screenwriting School go through the first 57 pages of my script, but he went off to Italy to seek dual citizenship after that, so the final 40 pages---which I had to write three times----was simply me, myself and I.
I ended up having to hire another service called Paper True, which had a very expensive charge to "proof" my efforts. I managed to bargain them down somewhat by asking for just the last 40 pages, but they worked 3 days and sent me back THE WRONG SCRIPT. (!) I have no idea whose script they returned, but I was up against the deadline for submission and we were leaving town. They worked overtime to "fix" the last 40 pages of the RIGHT script, but I had to send in what I had, with the corrections they had suggested.
Did they find all the mistakes I had made in formatting? I don't think so, but I wouldn't know, as I was the one who had made them in the first place. When I was a Finalist in the first competition, with the comment that I had "too many formatting errors" to be named the winner, I asked them to tell me what the formatting errors were. The contest judge refused, saying that to release his "scoring method" would put him at risk with other competitions.
This is a little like your English teacher flunking you because you haven't used punctuation properly, but refusing to tell you where your punctuation errors were. As you can imagine, my script, to this day, has issues that I'd like to "fix," but I don't have an extra $770 lying about for PaperTrue to fix the wrong script, return it to me on the day of the deadline, and then scramble about trying to undo the damage that their incompetence caused. (My incompetence started it all, but, again, it had been 11 years since my one and only screenplay.)
Entering the screenwriting competitions became addictive. It is a bit like sitting at the blackjack table and thinking you're going to win. I entered way too many of them, I'm sure, and not all accepted the script, which did have some unfinished secondary plots among the primary ones, because I had always thought that the story should go forward with books two and three.
This tendency to bring a plot point up (Tad's best friend's disappearance, for instance) but leave it hanging was considered a shortcoming in coverage notes. I would agree---unless the three books are going to serve as the basis for a series of some sort, which was my original intent. I did what I had to do to satisfy "the expert" (Mr. Crye), but I retained sub-plots dealing with Tad's best friend (Stevie Scranton) which wouldn't be resolved until Books two or three. O...…..K...….Onward.
The first screenplay came back with notes that said, "The dialogue is mouth-wateringly good, but you have 300 formatting errors in the last 40 pages."
Oh.
I called up Voyage Media and asked them why Mr. Crye never once mentioned a single "formatting error." I had purchased Final Draft 10 and was using that, but it had, after all, been over 10 years since I had written my first (and only) screenplay, which, coincidentally, was one of the winners of a Writer's Digest screenwriting competition. I asked Voyage Media if someone less high on the totem pole could go over the final 40 pages of my script for me and was told that that "wasn't part of your deal."
I thought that the deal was to give me guidance and point out where I was going wrong. (Apparently wrong.) I remember one night----errr, morning----at 5:30 a.m., Mr. Crye wrote back, large letters: "SERIOUSLY?" in incredulity at some plot point, and I burst out laughing.
My husband was going by on his way to the bathroom and he looked in at me in the office, all alone all night writing, and said, "What are you doing all by yourself at 5:30 in the morning laughing hysterically?"
What, indeed.
To conclude this long (hopefully not boring) story, my screenplay for THE COLOR OF EVIL (www.TheColorOfEvil.com) was accepted by 30 competitions. It has won 9 of them. It has been a Finalist in 13 of them. It has been a Semi-FInalist in 6 of them. That is a total of 28 out of 30 "wins." (93 and 1/3%).
So, what happens now?
Nothing, like always, because I am a good writer who has a good story to tell, but not the necessary money to market/publicize?
Or something?
Stay tuned for further developments and please check out THE COLOR OF EVIL at www.TheColorOfEvil.com.
Thank you very much.
Connie Corcoran Wilson, M.S.
www.ConnieCWilson.com