Lemonade Anyone?
I have so many lemons I’m practically swimming in the fuckers
That’s a euphimism and fuck you, too, spellcheck. How come you just underline things now without offering me those cutting little solutions of yore?
In the old days you would have suggested euidiot or eumoron
Are you okay? Are you on holdiay? Do you need help? Or lemons?
I was thinking on our walk this morning how things are all sort of overblown out there this time of year. We’re all so careful in the spring, you know, treating our gardens like family and weeding and seeding and watching and waiting and adoring and then the puttering stage where you don’t have to dig or find the wheelborrow you lent out (see what I did there spellcheck?) and you spend some time sitting back and looking around and enjoying it and then the end of July hits and it’s been so hot and rainy and humid that you just sort of leave the rainforest alone while you watch through your steamy window.
By the time you can breathe outside again, and make your way through the mosquitoes and the spiders plump as jellytots, it’s out of your hands
So that’s what I was thinking about on the path this morning. What used to be a wide path is now skinny and there’s grass trying to grow and things edging in so if you go early you get dewey-wet and also break a million spider webs. But this morning there was somebody in front of me, like way ahead, which was nice because she’d get all the webby stuff. I am a fast walker. (I read the other day on Medium a title that said, in so many words, that people who walk fast are unhappy. I did not click preferring to utter fuck you instead.)
Like how the fuck would anyone reach that conflusion (oooohhhh nice one, right?) – Hey spellcheck! You can take another week
Anyway back to the pathway. I soon caught up to early bird and man was she slow. Like I thought there was something wrong with her, you know, so I slowed way down which made me slightly sorry I’d chosen that path. I’d never seen such a slow walker and I wondered if the Medium person would hail her as deliriously fucking happy. Anyway. Daisy didn't know what the fuck so she just kept her pace up and the woman of course turned around and she said Oh. Sorry. I’m trying not to step on the snails.
Which is so sweet it hurts, right?
Which brings me right back to the lemons as if I’d planned it.
So if you’ve read my last few blogs you know that I’ve been turning The Whispering Gentlemen the novel into The Whispering Gentlemen the screenplay, to submit to Netflix Canada’s open pitch by closing date of August 5, so I could finally wear the boots I’ve been saving for my Oscar acceptance speech.
So I worked really hard, ignored my family and job – unless I work with you in which case I’m just kidding – and for two months I went at it hard and the results were, I think, as good as or better than I expected them to be.
I had the benefit of four wonderful beta readers – Mona, Barbara, Glory-Anne, and Sandra – who I fully intended to thank profusely while wearing those smashing silver boots.
So of course I’d gone to the Netflix site and read all the requirements, you know, found out you could actually send two pitches as long as they were in different categories and since I’ve got the bible already completed for Clutterbucks, I was going to throw that in the comedy side of things just for fun.
Now here’s the interesting bit: I knew The Whispering Gentlemen needed work. I knew there were vague spots and cringy ones, and inconsistent dates and other problems, too, but fixing them seemed impossible. It was overwhelming. I couldn’t do it. But rewriting it in the form of a screenplay was the perfect opportunity to make those changes.
It was a cinch, a pleasure, a gas
And as I was figuring it all out I thought a couple of times that I could rewrite the novel now, using the screenplay as guide. Didn’t seem so foreboding.
Anyway. I planned to have the screenplay done the week before it was due, which actually happened, and give myself an entire week to work on the actual pitch.
So Monday morning at 5:30 am I went back to the Netflix Canada site. That’s when the lemons came. It was gone. Replaced by a different pitch request and the submissions had to be in French.
Know any really fast translators?
So yeah. That happened. It’s gone. I looked for like three hours straight and nearly lost my shit but then I figured the tricky universe out and am starting, with my heart in my mouth, the novel rewrite.
