First a disclosure for the FTC: I earn small amounts of money from Amazon Affiliate links on this page. Affiliate links pay me a few cents if someone clicks through to Amazon and buys something, kind of like a tiny little commission. I have never received a free product from anyone, or been asked to include a product. Everything here was purchased by me, for me or for someone in my family.

Examples of My Writing:

My last screenplay, a PG-minus comedy starring my muse, Dwayne Johnson (feel free to bring it to his attention). It doesn't start strong . . . I know. I have a hard time evaluating my own work (basically, I love everything I've ever written). I do understand that my work may not inspire the same reaction from normal people.

An earlier screenplay, which was a quarter-finalist in the Nicholl! (It was the high point of my writing career.) I didn't have any actor in mind for this story, except for my heroine's sidekick, who was always Seth Rogen. It's a PG-plus thriller with some humor.

Many more screenplays that I won't share! I have written so many that I forget all about them.

A G-rated young adult science fiction novel, available for purchase on Amazon. I don't think anybody has ever read it. I'm afraid to look, in case they didn't like it. Let's just say that if you're unable to sleep, it might do the trick.

What I Would Like to Write:

I want to write a TV mini-series based on two books: The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War by Robert Manson Myers and Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic by Erskine Clarke. Never heard of either one? Both are non-fiction. The Children of Pride is a doorstop-sized collection of letters written by members of the Jones family between 1854 and 1868. Myers chose the letters from a massive collection of correspondence (I wish I could read the rest of the letters!) so that they would tell a coherent story of the family's experience before, during, and after the Civil War. There's no editorializing -- there's a prologue, an epilogue, a who's who, and an index, but in between the prologue and the epilogue written by Myers, it's all letters. Dwelling Place, published in 2005, tries to tell the same story from the perspective of the slaves owned by members of the Jones family. It provides more historical details, including the history of the family before the events in The Children of Pride.

I'd concentrate on two families: the main Jones family (who owned over a hundred slaves and three plantations) and Patience's (Patience was her real name!) family, slaves who spent their lives in servitude to the Joneses until the war set them free. These two books are chock-full of drama -- and all of it 100% true. An examination of how white and black people lived together under a system diametrically opposed to the ideals of our country, until Sherman's army ended their way of life as it destroyed the Georgian countryside.

I might spend my eventual retirement writing this screenplay, because it would be so fun. I don't own the rights but what would that matter, if no one's ever going to read it anyways? Bottom line, I'd love to watch the mini-series, so if you know someone (Brad Pitt? Steve McQueen? Oprah Winfrey?!?), feel free to pitch the idea for anyone to do. It could be definitive!

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