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Adaptation, novel to screenplay my book Heart of Clouds

Posted on by Adrienne in Adaptation, Novel, Screenplay, Writer

Copyright WordPress, September 2020 by Adrienne D. Wilson, all rights reserved

Heart of Clouds was written during NanoWrimo 2009 and first published there under my nom de plume VB-Demoiselle.

I self published my book through PressBooks https://heartofclouds.pressbooks.com/ April 24, 2012

It is available at Kobo, here, if you would like to read the original draft https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/heart-of-clouds-1

As a member of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, I expected the book to go through traditional channels in publishing, for instance a Literary Agent, but since that did not happen, the rewrite as a screenplay is in the live web. If you are interested, leave me a comment here. The book was just over 50,000 words, and won in NanoWrimo that year. It was a first novel.

The cover is an image of mine, a scene of clouds from Summerland Beach.

HEART OF CLOUDS – SCREENPLAY

by Adrienne D. Wilson

~

for Walter Halsey Davis

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

————————— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

LOGLINE: “Love, it’s the only thing that really matters.”

CAST OF CHARACTERS

TEENIE ALEXANDER – a girl of thirteen (seen as a child, then as adult)

DEVLIN UNDERWOOD – a boy of fourteen (seen as a child, then as an adult)

MR. HONEYGARTEN – a very old man, perhaps 90

GRANDPA JESS – Devlin’s Grandfather – perhaps age 70’s

CHRISTINA ALEXANDER (Teenie’s mother) a woman of 40’s

JAX ALEXANDER (Teenie’s father) a man – late 40’s

GRANDMA – Devlin’s Grandmother – perhaps age 70’s

CLAIRE – Mr. Honeygarten’s first love, the love of his life – she is seen as a young girl, and again as a ghost in his old age.

DEVLIN UNDERWOOD’s FATHER – a man 40’s

DEVLIN UNDERWOOD’s MOTHER – a woman 30’s

DOGS

MELLOMAN – a Golden Retriever (about six years old)

BROWNIE – a Chocolate Lab (puppy)

GENRE – DRAMA – This is a FAMILY FILM, the ratings would be G along that scale. It’s the story of a young boy and girl who meet on a beach one summer, maybe the worst summer of their lives. It’s a story of memory, and the sea, and the very first crush one has, and so it is a story of great innocence, for all ages. It has a happy Hollywood ending.

LOCATION – I wrote the film to be shot in a small village along the Pacific Coast, such as Summerland and Carpinteria, which retain the images of “villages” from another time. They are still old-fashioned enough to be timeless.

FADE IN

OPENING SCENE ONE EXT. BEACH. EARLY MORNING

The camera pans across the vastness of the sea, on a crisp morning, in the clear light of the Pacific, blue skies, shimmering waves. We see TEENIE ALEXANDER (age 13) running away, as if running from home down the empty beach, in glimmering light. A dolphin’s fin emerges, and it leaps – to the sound of classical oceanic sweeping music. Pan to a structure ahead of her, a sea hut made of driftwood like the kind that surfers build along the beaches here. It’s early Autumn, in the magic light along the Pacific. She sees the structure off in the distance and makes for it, In her pocket she carries a small journal embossed with flowers and a Waterman pen, both gifts from her father.

SCENE TWO INTERIOR NIGHT TEENIE’S ROOM (flashback)

Teenie is sitting on her bed trying to block out her parents JAX (40’s) and CHRISTINA (40’s). Their voices are getting louder and louder as another fight over money begins.

SUDDEN KNOCK

JAX

(Speaking softly)

Honey can I come in? I have something for you.

TEENIE

(nods her head, as door opens)

Dad…

JAX

(holding embossed journal and pen, her gift, squats down to hand them to his daughter, cups her face)

I have to leave tomorrow, honey. I wanted you to have these.

(PAUSE, then)

You have a heart made of clouds, you know that?

TEENIE

I do?

JAX

(gruffly, hugs her)

Never forget that okay? Never lose that little twinkle in your eye.

Great yarn!

Posted on by Adrienne in Adaptation, Novel, Art, Art Direction, My books, Writer

Working with this fabulous yarn from Scheepjes has taken my mind way into a land of special beauty.

But I am writing screenplay and I don’t understand why I got this message behind the scenes from WordPress? So I took a screenshot. I could crochet right now, or I could write. I am writing an adaptation of a novel I wrote back in 2009 in Nanowrimo that I worked very hard on. The rewrite to a screenplay is something I want to use my blog for?

I am not clear about Gutenberg?

Is this artificial intelligence?

I have never seen a message like this until the other day.

For writers WordPress is the best thing that was EVER invented. Not kidding.

I bought the premium version so I could write here?

In November I may write a novel here, when Nano starts again. I used my WP blog endlessly as my nom de plume Valentine Bonnaire, but this is the real me. I designed the book cover for Heart of Clouds myself, and the image is a shot of the clouds off Summerland Beach. WP would not allow me to link it from my old blog and I don’t know why!

This is what a screenplay looks like:

EXT. DAY. Summerland Beach

We see a giant thin cloud rolling across the sky, then a close up to a dolphin jumping.

That is what I was about to start writing.

I got this:

I have loved WP since 2007.

So I never mind talking to them right here in my blog.

xxoo!

Adrienne

here is a screenshot of behind the scenes just now:

It doesn’t want me to link to my OWN BOOK COVER. So I will crop it in Preview and try again. You know I love WordPress, because it has been so seamless since 2007. Everything was always easy and that is because of Ma.tt and all the people who work on this out of their hearts. Anyway tries again. What you are going to see is TEXT that I wrote, from a book I wrote in 2009, translated into what a screenplay looks like.

Hugs.

Here is what the book cover looks like.

I just went to check the news and took a screenshot and saw these. Just know I ❤ WordPress.

I also TRUST WORDPRESS more than any other site. I trust two companies. Firefox and WordPress. The others? Nope.

Hugs.

That is a portrait of my self, and my dog Odin. If you want to see the last thing I wrote in my blog Valentine Bonnaire, you can. I adopted him. These are the beaches we walk all the time and this is what SoCal looks like!

That is Summerland beach, the location for my novel Heart of Clouds.

So there you have it, you see?

Now I can retype the whole thing as I write the screenplay, or just photograph each page.

I’m debating putting a donate dealie on my page in here, and just yesterday I read about that? In the WP Reader. Because this is going to be one of the most beautiful books you have ever read, you see?

It is.

It will also be one of the most beautiful films EVER MADE.

xxoo!

from the WRITER

Adrienne Wilson

The summer of our discontent

Posted on by Adrienne in Adaptation, Novel, Jeff Bridges, My books, Santa Barbara Writers Conference 2019, Screenwriter, Writer

How to even begin, with the world in this kind of state?

I would not know.

Except for one thing. I am furious with a ghost. It was my screenwriting teacher Walter Halsey Davis from the SB Writer’s Conference who passed away last summer not long after the Conference ended.

They say it isn’t right to speak ill of the dead, except, what he did to me was unfathomable, but not if you understand the kind of shit Hollywood can be made of. From 2006 until 2019 he was my teacher, and I waited. Twice when I was published under my nom de plume I handed him the books, so that he could see I was a published writer, so that he would take me seriously. Then I handed him my children’s book Heart of Clouds, which I wrote (as a Depth Psychologist from Pacifica Graduate Institute) to address core woundings and how to heal them. I was taken with his film “Do You Remember Love” that starred Joanne Woodward who is one of my faves as an actress, especially for her films like Rachel, Rachel and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds. Are those links in youtube? They might be.

Never put all your eggs in one basket. That’s something my grandmother used to say, and I did.

The last thing I ever handed him was a copy of my play, Vanilla Suede.

One dirty trick he pulled on me?

At the last night dinner at the Conference the teachers hand out prizes to the writers who have been in the workshops. Well, I handed him the assignment, do a screenplay using cliches. It was a Rom Com, and funny as hell. I thought he actually meant it, as a teacher. I have had many many teachers in my life. He never said ONE WORD to me, about my writing. He never said ONE WORD about my screenplay. He never said ONE WORD about the book to go to film I wrote that was dedicated to him. Here is what he said in class. “Does anyone have something they want to pitch to me?” I was so in awe of him that it took me three years to work up to that.

What a mean, sorry piece of shit he was.

So here is the deal.

The last sentence he ever said to me was “Let’s go to France.” That was by the pool, when I bought him a drink at the Conference and got him a plate of food. “I need red berries,” he said. In two months he would be gone.

I still have a bad taste in my mouth from those berries.

Last summer I asked a priest at the Mission to bless the book, and I handed it to a bookstore owner here, to ask him what he thought. He loved it. He saw it as a film.

So here is what I am going to do. Right here, in WordPress, copyright to me, I am going to rewrite the book as a screenplay. I am finished with writing under noms, forever. The book has themes that are important to children in it. For survival. So you can help me out here if you want because I would love feedback from the global audience that reads WordPress. The kids need a feel good film. They and the audiences need to see HOPE, and I wrote that for them.

“Let it go,” my husband said. “Just let it go.”

He cannot possibly understand the level of hurt Walter inflicted on me. He can’t. Chalk it up to the men in Hollywood being Weinsteinesque.

They aren’t the only men in the world.

I’m still in a bad mood, and we are a summer past last year.

Good thing I have WordPress, huh?

I grew up on the finest films that ever came out of Hollywood. In fact both my uncle Spencer Crilly and my dad Don Brown were both filmmakers. Yeah, they were. You can see pictures of both of them over in FB. Heart of Clouds is a charmer of a story about two kids on a beach, one summer, like the kind of childhood I had, which was sweet and full of good people. I set the place as Summerland, here in California, and so in the book when I refer to “the village” that is the setting for the location.

End scene from the film Rachel, Rachel is here:

Here is the film Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds

xxoo!

from Adrienne

(who can go back and even see the notes in my old blog from the years I wrote it, in Nanowrimo)

C.S. Lewis came to me in a dream the last few days of the writing of the novel. It was fab. As I wrote the scenes for the book I had favorite actors in mind for the parts. But there are lots of actors and people in Hollywood who can play them, no? So what I write are called character studies. Those are the kind of classic films about people my generation grew up on.

Who were the actors I had in mind as i wrote the book?

One of them lives here in town. Jeff Bridges. I had the part of Grandpa Jess in mind for him because when I was a little girl, just a teen, I saw one of my favorite films on earth, “The Last Picture Show.” Here it is from youtube:

I have seen nearly every film Jeff Bridges ever made. I wanted to write parts that can win an OSCAR. Walter, my teacher WON THE HUMANITAS PRIZE. It matters. But the really big part in the film goes to the character Mr. Honeygarten, because both these characters are seminal in the story. I was just a kid in High School here in Santa Barbara when I saw The Last Picture Show. I wanted the part of Mr. Honeygarten to go to Robert Duvall. These are two actors that I love, for all the years they have been in film. Both these guys are BELOVED. In fact last night on TCM I watched Duvall in Altman’s MASH. I never saw that as a kid, wow. It was on TV, but what a film. Altman’s “Short Cuts” is one of my all time favorites. So, what the kids are watching in 2020 does not have the innocent beauty of stories like we grew up on, or even films we saw. As kids we grew up on a very different Disney.

I went to school with the Bottoms Boys. In this film. I saw it the year it was made on the big, big screen. What a film. It just so happens I grew up in this town, where SBIFF is. So here is Jeff Bridges a few years ago. Walter should have taken me seriously.

Look what Jeff Bridges is up to!

The character of Grandpa Jess plays a stringed instrument. Check it out!

Jeff Bridges Creates Signature, Sustainably Sourced Guitar

Scheepjes CAL 2020

Posted on by Adrienne in Art, crochet

I just got a box of beautiful yarn. Two, actually. Three, actually.

I have wanted to participate in a CAL since I became aware of them a few years ago, but didn’t think I was talented enough to do the kind of complexity that is required to crochet one of them. The yarn is gorgeous, a cotton string, but it is the colors that are so fantastic.

One thing that makes this one really special is that a writer is being honored for his book and you can see that here, he won the Pulitzer for the book, which takes place in WW2. I picked up my copy at the SB Writer’s Conference a couple of years ago, but didn’t have the time to look.

Imagine.

Your work as a writer spinning off into such glorious directions. I chose Herbarium for my colorway on this. I had wanted to try the yarns from Scheepjes for some time, and now I am.

I got the little artist’s sampler box as well, for their Stonewashed and Riverwashed colors.

Practiced using it.

This design came from Bianca, of Bianca’s Crochet Palace in Youtube. Her “Say it With Flowers” and you can see that here:

If you aren’t writing, use a crochet hook. That is what all of us know as writers.

We leave a yarn, and we stud it with hooks.

The yarn has been amazing to look at, and to work with. Really looking forward to making this one. It starts in a few days, and there are several colorways you can read about at the Scheepjes website. These yarns come from The Netherlands, and so they have them in Europe, but not here.

It’s always important how the writer chose to open and end a book, on a sentence.

Here is the first sentence, and the last sentence.

“At dusk they pour from the sky.” — Anthony Doerr

“Until all she can hear are the sighs of cars and the rumble of trains and the sounds of everyone hurrying through the cold.” — Anthony Doerr

Imagine the Pulitzer, or the Booker. Or the Nobel.

(file under things writers want)

What lies between those two sentences is about to take crocheters all over the world into his book and a design they can craft.

How lovely that is.

xxoo!

Adrienne

Labor Day 2020 – American

Posted on by Adrienne in My books, Writer

Where to begin?

I have much to say about work in America, and the very most to say about American Newspapers, like say the one I spent 20 years working for. You will never guess who owned it, and this won’t be genre by a long shot for me.

I seem to have many people from China reading my blog. Well since you don’t like what Disney did with Mulan perhaps you might like my Heart of Clouds better. Personally I grew up on the original Walt Disney and all the great films that came out of Hollywood at that time, saw when Disney had built the original Disneyland here in California.

So Nanowrimo is on the horizon once again and it helps to have deadlines, like we used to in the newspaper industry. I’ll just give you a sneak peak about what it’s been like in American companies, no? In this little shorty I wrote once called Human Resources. It’s at my old blog, and I can’t believe I wrote that back in 2009. I did. https://valentinebonnaire.com/2009/03/09/human-resources-a-short-story/

That is where I will begin the book, and we’ll just go from there. What it will be about is how women were treated by corporations here in America, in the years 1981 to 2001. Many of the characters you are about to meet have died, so when you see them as characters, they will be UNIVERSAL as writers like myself grew up on the finest Literary writers there are.

Do universal people share universal traits?

Oh hell, yes.

You know it.

Anyway, I’m sick of the selfish greedy bastard who owns the multibillionaire “outlet” that sells books so I didn’t put my Heart of Clouds anyplace near him. NOPE. You can buy a copy of it here and learn something of American life for yourselves.

$3.99 in American dollars is 6.84 in your yuan. That seems right.

Did I tell you that one of my bosses sold the printing press we had to China in the late 80’s?

He did.

It seems to me we all saw Tianamen Square on TV in those years.

Here is your easily translatable Wikipedia on all that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests

Let’s see if China is willing to read an American book. I need to work on the screenplay but it is too hot here right now, so hot we can’t even think. So here you are: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heart-of-clouds-adrienne-wilson/1118229068?ean=2940148168928

In the meantime, I just bought some fab yarn from Scheepjes, which is made over in your country. At least it has cotton in it, and the colors are gorgeous.

I let you sample some of my short stories for free, but I should like to sell my kid’s book. It’s going to bring TONS of hope to the children of the world, it really will.

Going to make something really gorgeous with that yarn. This! https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/dhistoire-naturelle-scheepjes-cal-2020

xxoo!

Adrienne

(this is actually a test to see if I will get paid for my book).

Fruit Garden CAL!

Posted on by Adrienne in Art, Coronavirus Diaries, crochet, Design, yarn

Progress!

I am ready to do the stripey border, very soon now….

So in the months I haven’t been writing, I started to crochet.

I am loving the Stylecraft yarns, and I know I am going to love Sheepjes as well. Yarn on the way, gorgeous things to create.

The complexity of this pattern is so gorgeous and since I joined Ravelry I have found all my fave designers. In a lockdown of misery what else can we do?

It’s been sheer hell on earth, and boring as hell, but there is YARN, and where there is fab yarn there is beauty! Here you can see what the edging is all about. This blanket is so gorgeous. So I am a bit nervous about the edging, but have a great teacher, in the designer!

xxoo!

from Adrienne

Yarn as paint

Posted on by Adrienne in Art, crochet, Design

That is how I have been feeling as I complete the Fruit Garden CAL designed by Janie Crow. To explain how I feel about all things Brit goes back to being 13 and getting Mary Quant so, well, getting this gorgeous yarn from Stylecraft is a bit like that. But so is this pattern as it is a real design by an artist. So you can check out her other designs!

So, I wasn’t able to get a kit with the correct colors and it was a mad hunt trying to think what to use, but, the colors that I chose remind me of Brideshead Revisited, many moons ago. The original.

I wish I could show you this pile of colors I have had to work with, but here is an idea of that.

I am crazy over the Batiks, especially the Inky Navy. The Hollyhock motif is my favorite, but I love the orange in the dusky orange, and Old Gold.

This DK weight of yarn is new to me, and I love it.

I had to sub Cream for the Parchment as it was sold out, and I was really worried because I wanted that butterscotch feel of the antique version she designed. I think Cream will work with the Caramel.

That the DK Life range has wool in it, has been fantastic. Just that little bit of wool seems to make all the difference. There aren’t yarns here like this. So it’s like getting a box of very happy paints.

I want it to come off as the 20’s. Over in Ravelry they said “Romantic” – well yes, I suppose so.

Oh boy more yarn is coming soon. I was really tempted once I saw that Duck Egg Nepp. So I may go for this all over again in greens and purples. The cream colored Nepp as a backdrop and the Duck as border.

Just thinking of Waugh, and listening to the voiceover…. this is one of the most gorgeous things you will ever watch. I saw it was on Tubi TV.

So happy with this yarn.

This gorgeous design.

Tea is in order.

I switched the leaves in the center. Fern and Gorse Nepp.

xxoo!

Almost there.

Almost in that beauty that is England.

Heart of Clouds, Summerland magic

Posted on by Adrienne in Writer, Writer, Writing

The unexpected magic yesterday of being down on Summerland beach. The last time I was there was at this time last year, after Walter Davis, my screenwriting teacher at the SB Writers Conference passed. Two writers who were important to me passed last year, he and Kate Braverman.

The last thing Walter ever said to me, was, “Let’s go to France.”

I spent a great deal of time last year at the end of summer on the beach there, with the driftwood structures, as those are a main theme in the book I have written for children. Well guess what? I met the artist on those, and is there ever a fantastic one there now.

Funny how life works, the passage of one year. The Conference wasn’t on this year because of the Covid.

I feel better in Summerland.

So Odin and I went, after a whole year almost, at Sunset. Today I am taking the book down to them, to see what they think of the themes. It is great to meet people like that, in such a sacred, sacred place to me. Most of my location shots last year were down in that area all the way to Loon point.

It was written to go to film and in scenes. I may just write that right here in WordPress, like I did the play before the Conference last year. I took a short story and simply converted it over into a play. From Walter I learned to write character studies, as that is what he did, and my book was an answer piece to his film “Do You Remember Love.”

Well, I know those guys I met on the beach are going to love it, because it is the local childhood I wrote that exists here. My heart went into that book, and all my training as a therapist, as well. The thing is Walter didn’t even care. Well? I may put that book for sale right here in WordPress I am so angry that he couldn’t even bother to get back to me. My opinion of Hollywood isn’t that great. Anyway, my best year at the Conference was a few years ago when I got to meet Janet Fitch who studied with Kate Braverman. Her “White Oleander” went to film and is one of the classics.

There is more to life than crochet, perhaps. Or anger. Seeing that driftwood structure made my day yesterday, it really did. I shot the cover for the book right off the beach there.

I said, “You can design Devlin’s hut. My god look what you have built here.”

I asked him if he did the ones last year and he had.

How incredible is that?

xxoo!

On the crochet front I am working on something called the Fruit Garden CAL that reminds me of Brideshead Revisited, a series I loved very much once, back in college years. The character of Sebastian and his Teddy. I love Waugh and other English writers. Always have. CS Lewis came to me in a dream that last few pages of my book.

All the pix of what I saw on the beach last year are over in FB and I’m not. I’m giving it a wide berth. The other day an old friend called and said the rumor on FB was that I was dead. Not yet.

Here is some crochet. I have not done things like this since I was 13 with my best friend, not kidding. I had to work in corporate hell, and maybe the next book will be about the newspaper years and what it was like for women on the job. Today is going to be fun.

If this isn’t the most gorgeous design what is?

Janie Crow’s Fruit Garden CAL in Ravelry and Youtube

I didn’t have one of her kits, with her colors, drat.

I am going to finish this, yep.

I plan to.

Hope all of you are well. This virus thing is so hard on us. To be at the empty beach yesterday was fabulous, and Odin my dog loves that beach.

Today, again.

Seeing people who will love the book.

Yarn and memoir

Posted on by Adrienne in crochet, Memoir, My books, Uncategorized, yarn

So the fantastic first package of yarn arrived yesterday, bursting with Stylecraft and the Janie Crow colors to make her design for The Fruit Garden CAL. I joined Ravelry a few days ago, am Adrienne101 there. It amazes me that all the designers from around the world that I had been looking at in Youtube are in there. Crocheting sort of saved me during the last two years. I’m not sure how that worked exactly, but it did.

Anyway, it had been years and years and years since I picked up any yarn or thread to do anything. I practiced and practiced by watching videos of all kinds of women and people around the world in all of their different languages.

This morning I thought, wow, you know? I did this instead of writing. But writers do many things if the words aren’t there. They will be again. Walter’s death really was heavy for me at last year’s conference. I learned much from him about writing scenes. It’s not that much different from crochet. So my best friend and I at 13. That is in my memoir. We started off crocheting to escape in those years. We were escaping everything, I expect. You are on such a cusp at 13, you know? So this is a chapter called “Strings” https://valentinebonnaire.com/2010/12/29/strings-from-memoir-whitegirrrl-short-chapter/ that I was working on in 2010 – that whole book needs an edit, ooof. Some of the chapters make me cry they are so hard to look back on.

Anyway, the two of us would go downtown to a place called The Yarn Mart in those years. We would wander through, after school. It’s long gone now. But I love to get lost with yarn and fabrics. It takes me so far back I’m practically in childhood, as in “FUN” so this morning I finished off a little heart by a South African designer called Jen Tyler.

So, one of the boxes of the new yarn arrived, yesterday!

OMG. It puts the Big Box yarn I had to shame. I think this yarn and I are going to be beloved friends.

Check it out!

That’s the little Forget-Me-Not flower from the Fruit Garden CAL. My best friend Pam at 13 grew up loving the Pre-Raphaelites. Funny, this pattern – the colors.

Her grandmother had made her a classic blanket, that was in her room when we were so little. I started one of those blankets where you keep going around and around the square, you know?

Well, who knew that I was going to grow up and attempt something as gorgeous as what Janie Crow has designed. Neither my mother or my grandmother did anything like this. I did hear that my Irish great grandmother used to make lace, but I have never seen it.

Forget me not.

xxoo!

from Adrienne

(who will be back on the writing jag soon enough)

I am so over politics, and this virus.