My novel, well, novella maybe, The Haight (amazon.com) is now available as an Ebook for the Kindle. The Haight originated as a script after my agent, Ann McDermot of the Coast To Coast Agency, asked me to adapt my novel Paid To Die, Anarchy In The USA, as a script. She explained that the publishing industry is in New York while agents in Hollywood shopped scripts. Adapting the full 300 plus page novel to a 120 page script was tough so for my next writing project I elected to start with a script.
The Haight - Now for the Kindle.
I signed the agency contract on September 7th, 2001 and one week later on the eleventh, everything changed and Coast To Coast soon after eliminated their literary department. Since I stopped writing books in order to concentrate on scripts, since that's what my agent wanted, I was now stuck with movie scripts and no agent. People outside of the film and television industries don't know how to read a script. A lot of a script is written in code, movie maker lingo, and is very difficult to understand and even harder to enjoy just as reading material. But I liked the story of The Haight, which was about what it was like to be a hippie in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer Of Love like the John Millius film Big Wednesday was about what it was like to be a surfer in Southern California in the Sixties, and I wanted somebody to be able to read it so I adapted the script into a book.
Adapting a movie script into a book has its own set of problems. You don't have to throw out over fifty percent of the story like you do when adapting a novel to a script but a script can have a lot of scenes that work visually and are very difficult to describe to a reader. In a script you're basically writing directions to a director so you can just say what effect you're going for and suggest how to achieve that visually but in a book you have to make the reader see that scene in his or her mind and you have to describe it in a clear yet poetic manner. Very tough.
Unlike a script for a movie or TV show the book I wrote about the Summer Of Love doesn't have to be about an undercover cop disguised as a hippie in order to catch a serial killer just a story about what might have happened if you were a young person who decided to spend the summer of '67 among the Flower Children.
Please leave a review if you read the book or ebook, thanks.
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