ALMOST A BRIDE (Open On Annie)

Bonus chapter- Chris POV 1

We open on Emily, she is 25, blonde attractive and she is….

I stop typing. My mind goes blank. What the fuck is Emily doing anyway? Who the hell is Emily? And why did I even choose the name Emily?

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The words disappear off the screen and I try and start again. But it’s as if I no longer have two brain cells to rub together. It’s as if I’ve never written anything in my entire life which is a massive, and I mean massive problem, since I have a script deadline in two weeks.

Romantic comedy. Tropical island. And… and what? That’s all I had, after months of brainstorming, that was it. Genre and location.

I raise my fingers over the keyboard again and start typing…

We open on Samantha, she is 23, brunette and ugly as shit. I hate her. I hate this screenplay and I hate all the lame corny people out there that still buy tickets to go see these cheesy, schlocky, stupid films that always have a lame-ass crappy ending that when I write, makes me cringe and want to throw-up.  I don’t even believe in love!

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Somehow, I didn’t think that was going to fly- although an unattractive heroine would make a great change in a Hollywood movie, instead of the usual. The clichéd usual. I was so sick of clichés, I don’t think I had been in proximity to anything real in years, that’s what living in LA is like. It’s all fancy window dressing and some days I can’t help but wonder- if you peeled it all away, what would be left underneath? And if you removed all the silicone, false nails, false lashes and Botox, what would the woman really look like? Would they even be woman under it all, or just strange blobs of flesh and limbs? Maybe I should be writing a sci-fi instead?

In all my years of writing, this was the first time I’d ever experienced writers block. I’d always thought it was a myth, made up by lazy writers that liked to sit in coffee shops all day drinking Mocha-Choca-whacka- whacka- frappe whatever’s. But it’s real. And it hurts.

I have this one writer friend- esoteric as hell. He’s the kind of guy that only eats fruit that he grows in his own organic veggie garden, and that walks around with his hands in the prayer position while wearing leather sandals and burning incense everywhere he goes. He believes in a collective conscious, this place somewhere in the sky where ideas are stored, he claims that this is where he gets his stories from. He meditates and allows his mind to enter the consciousness and pluck a story from it and channel it through his body, into his fingers and onto the screen.

Now, while I usually laugh behind his back very loudly, I was willing to try anything at this point in my life. So I closed my eyes and concentrated on this so-called collective consciousness, this virtual, cyber bank of stories that existed somewhere up there in the ether.  I really did hope it was real…

I sat very still. My eyes were closed. I took a slow breath in and out. I was concentrating. I was imagining my brain growing wings and flying up, up, up…

Further up.. a little higher… up… higher…????

But no matter how hard I concentrated and how many obscure images I tried to conjure, this Holy Grail of stories was just not appearing to me. And I was starting to feel like a total tit sitting there on the beach with my computer not typing while the people around me frolicked in the waves and sunbathed. I scratched my face, it was itchy. I hadn’t shaved in about two weeks and had grown a full-blown beard. I knew I needed to shave it off as soon as possible, before someone got the wrong idea about me and mistook me for a hipster and offered me a vinyl of some obscure band or a homemade crafty thing and then forced me to Instagam it.

“If a hipster does something, but doesn't instagram it, did it really happen?”

OR

If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody’s around to hear it, will a hipster buy the soundtrack?

I’d been on my ipad reaserching hipsters that morning. I’d had this idea that maybe I’d make one of the characters like that, and the other one mainstream. Isn’t that just another example of a great romantic cliché? Pretty blonde cheerleader good girl type, meets dark grungy goth guy with tattoos and falls in love.  Football jock falls in love with geeky hipster girl with big black-framed glasses.

I felt nauseous just thinking about it again. Usually this shit came easily, I could sprout it out like a bleeding fountain- but today I was not. Not yesterday either, or the day before that, or the week before that and the week before that. I’d been staring at a blank screen now for weeks.

I’d even climbed on a plane spontaneously and taken a flight to Mauritius, tropical paradise, just too see if it would inspire me. Maybe watching the young honeymooners in love strolling down the white sandy beaches hand- in- hand would inspire some kind of romantic story. But they were not inspiring me. No one was. I was desperately looking for inspiration- but it was proving to be a real elusive bitch.

And then… you know how you can just feel it when someone is staring at you? It’s hard to explain, but it’s just a feeling you get. I spun around, and sure enough, a few loungers down…

Open on a red head, mid twenties, pretty, sitting on a lounger drinking a cocktail and staring across the beach at a hairy looser writer.

I looked back down at my computer screen.

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I was in serious shit. If I couldn’t find something to write about, and soon, this might actually be the end of my career.

*A reminder to all my readers that Burning Moon will be on sale on Monday. YAY! You can buy it through Amazon and all the other major  online stores. The Amazon link is on my profile, and below. 

Thanks, JO