Hey there,
Thanks for signing up for my newsletter, which I send when I remember to send one. My dad used to be my online assistant and since he passed away more than ten years ago it’s been difficult staying on top of these things. So, apologies for signing up for something that is sent intermittently and only when I can remember the password to my accounts.
(I forgot the password to one of my fanmail accounts during the height of Witches of East End on Lifetime, and when I found it years later discovered some of my readers DID NOT like the show. I loved the show! I’m sorry you didn’t. But I’m glad I didn’t know about this while I was happily enjoying the show. Sometimes ignorance IS bliss.)
Anyway, I will send the newsletter on an irregular basis but will try to send it when I have a book coming out and have links and everything to where to buy the books.
I will also start a subscriber service, and will write little fun blogs about writing books & TV, mom-ing, shopping, pandemic life living… so if you’d like to hear about that, there will soon be a handy subscriber thingy. Until then everything will be FREE! But writers should be paid, so if I’m not trying to shill something, but writing for entertainment, I will charge for it.
I wrote this blog about Hollywood and Blue Bloods three weeks ago which is the amount of time it took to get VERIFIED by Substack. Utterly annoying since it says “it takes one day to get verified.” Nooooo it does not! I sent them a huffy email saying I was going to take my business elsewhere! Then I suddenly got verified. America.
Anyway, here it is:
BREAK MY HEART ONCE
Subtitle: Here we go again Hollywood
More than a decade ago, around 2008? 2009? I can’t remember. Anyway, back when vampires were hot and new, Hollywood came calling to make Blue Bloods into a movie or television show. It didn’t happen. Then over the years, I turned down about six or seven offers to option or adapt it, since I was still writing it. I guarded it like My Precious. I wanted to be able to tell the story without having to worry about how the makers of the movie/TV show would change it and the fans of the movie/TV show would feel about the original books. This was MY story. MINE!!!!
My agents were a bit confounded by this. “This is the same deal we offered NAMEBESTSELLINGYAAUTHORSERIES here, and you’re TURNING US DOWN?!” I don’t know why I turned them all down. Actually I do know. I just wasn’t interested, especially after we had tried to make it a TV show and lost out to THE VAMPIRE DIARIES. This is a long story and if you have ever seen me on tour, you have heard it because it is a story I tell very well and you will laugh a lot. But I’m tired right now and don’t have time to give it its full due. So, I’ll just cut to the punchline, in 2008 (or 2009) the CW came to me and said they wanted to make a TV show of my book, I worked with McG and his people (very nice people, I enjoy getting their Christmas card every year still) and everyone said it would happen, but then the CW passed. They bought THE VAMPIRE DIARIES instead. That show is dead to me. That was my time slot!
(cue laughter in a crowded bookstore)
After that heartbreak, I just wasn’t interested. HOLLYWOOD LIES! I told everyone. They told me it was happening! Like a fool, I believed them! So when many people offered to buy and make the books in the years since, I said no, no, no thank you, oh wow that’s cool, but no thank you. Which is weird because mostly writers are just dying to have ONE option, not seven. Here is a list of people who have wanted to make Blue Bloods: Mel Gibson, Bret Easton Ellis, Charlize Theron, Sylvester Stallone, and those are just the celebrities. I can’t remember the production companies lol.
So anyway, I still own the rights to this, my bestselling, my best, my PRECIOUS series. Now Hollywood has come calling again. And I’m not so young and big-headed anymore. I’ve had a TV show made from my books (Witches of East End) and TV movies (Pride, Prejudice & Mistletoe, etc). I know a little more about how it all works, sort of. For instance, it’s real when people start saying “well, we’ll see, let’s hope.” It’s NOT real when people say “Oh this is TOTALLY happening.”
One of my readers said that all the actors in their dreamcast of the series are now in their 40s. LOL! Maybe they can play the grown-up parts then? Ha!
Will there be a TV show? Well, we’ll see. Let’s hope!
XOXO
Mel
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