Category Archives: Powerful Women

Nobel Prize Laureate: Annie Ernaux

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As a fan of Annie Ernaux I was delighted to read that she was the 2022 Nobel Prize Laureate for literature.

The Swedish Committee selected Annie Ernaux for the Nobel Prize for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory

Among her novels are ‘A Man’s Place’, ‘A Woman’s Story’ and ‘Years’.

Ernaux’s work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.

In her Nobel Lecture Ernaux said: 

Writing in a democratic country, however, I continue to wonder about the place women occupy in the literary field. They have not yet gained legitimacy as producers of written works. There are men in the world, including the Western intellectual spheres, for whom books written by women simply do not exist; they never cite them. The recognition of my work by the Swedish Academy is a sign of hope for all female writers.

To read her entire lecture click here.

I am always excited when a new book of hers is out on the market. Her latest book Getting Lost, is the diary she kept while she was having an affair with a married Soviet diplomat and which she wrote about in her biography/memoir Simple Passion.

 Annie Ernaux writes beautifully about passion, love, pain, mourning and shame.

For more on her and her books click here.

New Book: The Lilac NoteBook

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I am proud to present my latest novel The LILAC NOTEBOOK – a novel about Alzheimer’s, incest and murder.

Three university friends. One in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, another out for revenge and a third murdered.
Age 40, Holly Baranov is in the beginning stages of fast advancing Alzheimer’s. Unwilling to care for her, Holly’s husband leaves her. While frightened to be on her own, Holly is relieved to be freed from the clutches of a controlling husband.
She moves out of her large home in the middle-class west end section of Montreal and into a small apartment near McGill University where she enrolls in a poetry course in the hopes of activating new brain cells.
There she meets Kim Harris, a thirty-something beautiful but damaged law student and Amelia Rose, a twenty-year-old pole dancer in a seedy nightclub who wants nothing more than to graduate, teach high school, marry and raise a family.
When Amelia is found strangled in her apartment, Holly becomes embroiled in the investigation, both as amateur detective and prime suspect. Along with her fading memory, she has also lost her ability to speak and write. Uncertain whether she killed Amelia as her friend Kim, her ex-husband Roy and the police suspect her of doing so, Holly must race against her own failing memory, and progressive illness, to discover the real murderer, even if that means finding out the truth about herself.

Available on Amazon

and Smashwords

Free Kindle app Available on iOS, Android, Mac and PC.

Thank you for your support.

Please help me spread the word by posting this on your social media preference and /or e-mailing it to your friends. A short revue will be gratefully appreciated.

Screenwriting: Genre, Setting, Concept

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In this post I share with you three other elements that are included in the proposal of a screenplay.

Genre:

In Save The Cat (see my previous post) Blake Snyder mentions ten types of genres. He cautions about staying away from “standard genre types such as Romantic Comedy, Epic or Biography- because those names don’t really tell me anything about what the story is.”

As a standard genre my story is romantic drama, but in following Snyder’s advice my genre falls under the Rites of Passage type. “These are tales of pain and torment , but usually from an outside force; Life.” Movies that Snyder classifies under this type include stories about puberty, mid-life crisis, old age, romantic break-up, and grieving stories.

Settings:

Although my series takes place in part in India, Italy and Boston I have omitted these scenes from the screenplay. I do mention the character going to India but I only speak of her impressions upon her return. Similarly, I do not have the character go to Boston or Italy. The reason for doing this is that film producers are money minded. Having the crew travel to film a scene ups the costs which might make a producer reject the screenplay.

So my settings are: A women’s center in a middle-class area of a city. Bars and pubs, restaurants. The characters’ apartments. Conference hall. Art Gallery. Inside taxi cab. Backyard garden. Museum. Gym. Office. Golf Course. Library. Construction site of a donut shop. Inside a car.

These are easily filmed on set or at least in the city where the film is being made.

Concept:

This is the synopsis of the story. One thing I was told to keep in mind, is that the agents/producers/directors are busy people and don’t have time to read through pages of what your film or series is about. What they will be more interested in is the script itself which I will talk about in another post.

The concept is the heart of the proposal and includes:

An introduction to the idea of your story along with main emotions and theme. Here you can include one sentence story examples.

A paragraph which outlines the story in each episode – its beginning and ending.

Visual Elements that are in the story. Is it entertainment, an interview, narration, animation. Is there a host?

Finally, clarity and brevity is key.

Please note that I will not be as active on Social Media for the next while as my family is preparing a funeral for my brother-in-law and in the weeks that follow I will be involved in helping care of my sister, who is eighty, and will need support as she begins her grieving process.

Based on my Getting To Mr. Right Series

Please visit my author page on Amazon

THE LOGLINE

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A few weeks ago I completed a twelve hour course on Creating A TV Series Proposal given by Jennifer McAuley sponsored by The Quebec Writers’ Federation.

One of the features of writing a proposal for TV is to have a GREAT logline. It’s one to three sentences that grabs the agent, producer, director, audience attention to your story. It is precise and gets to the point of your story.

Here’s my logline for my TV script (which might change as I go along writing the script) but for now here it is:

According to Keri Novak’s PhD study group, women who have had absent fathers grow up assuming that they are doomed to unsuccessful relationships with men. That is, until Keri meets her own Prince Charming putting her research and the award she is about to receive in jeopardy.

Does this grab your attention?

Based on my Getting to Mr. Right Series

Please visit my author page on Amazon.