The First Week

Well, I've been in Los Angeles for a week now, and despite the rain, the potholes and the crazy drivers, I love it here!

Leaving Vancouver, I received so many warnings of how the roads were going to be terrible, but all in all, other than the first day which was a downpour of rain, the drive was beautiful, especially driving through southern Oregon and into California.

After arriving in Los Angeles, I could feel my excitement building as I walked up the steps into my new Beverly Hills apartment, that was, until I looked into my "room" and my heart dropped. The "room" was the size of a walk in closet, and lining all of the available walls were tupperware tubs full of stuff, and a large bookshelf absolutely full of books and pictures and nick-knacks, making the room 8x8 space more like 6x6 for me to fit all of my belongings. My bed is a bunk bed with the bed above and the desk below, and so I set about going to IKEA and Staples for dressers and such to help with the compact space. Thankfully, since there wasn't a closet, there was a clothes rack that was at my disposal at the apartment that I used as a makeshift closet pushed against the bookshelf. Now, the room feels more like home to me, it's still a little more cluttered than I would normally like, but I've made it work.

My school schedule is crazy, school from 9:30am-8:30pm Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, even sometimes Saturdays. Thankfully, we get Wednesday and Friday off for screenwriting. Tomorrow I go in for my first of 2 orientations this week, then school officially starts on Monday and I'm excited(80%)/nervous(20%). I'm pretty excited about the perks of the school though, I've been receiving regular invites to Screenings and then Q&A's at the Warner Brothers Studio with people like Ron Howard and Garry Marshall. I can't wait to start attending those!

I've also fallen in love with Santa Monica. I found a cheap place to park (parking can be an issue some places out here) for $1/hour so I can jog on the beach. It's beautiful there! I truly have made the right decision for my life. This is where I'm meant to be!

Scripts I'm working on right now

I have just completed my first Modern Family spec script, and am in the process of writing a spec Glee script. I have spent most of the last 15 years focusing on features (18 written so far), but now I've decided to try something new :)

Watch for Bull Tag, my main feature, someday in theatres. It was a quarterfinalist in the 2009 Scriptapalooza Screenplay Competition.

Zamboni Confessions is another one of my features, and it is 90% done and waiting to be judged.

This is where I will be living, in Beverly Hills :)

The Decision

In a month I set off on an adventure to re-create who Emily Thierry-Gray is, and what she does.

California: to go or not to go. That is the question I've been pondering over these past 6 months. 

I've wanted to be a screenwriter since I was 12 years old when I read my first X-Files script. That was it, I'd found my calling and I've been writing scripts as a hobby ever since. Now, you'd think that if you've always known what you were meant to do, then why not do it first off, instead of 15 years later? The answer is simply that I was afraid of not being good enough. To quote Portia de Rossi, "what if they could immediately see that I wasn't exceptional and special, that I was merely an average girl?"

But I've now decided, screw it, you'll never know what people think of your writing unless you let them read it! So, I'm off to Los Angeles for 9 months (or longer), to learn everything I don't already know about screenwriting from the New York Film Academy on the Universal Studios lot in Burbank, California. I'm following my dreams so I can wake up every day and be excited to go to work from this day forward.

Please join me in my journey to happiness and fulfilment in Los Angeles :)