Los Angeles, earache and raunchy beans.

By Bill Kirton

Just two bits of writing-related trivia this week.

We quite often hear about novels that have been optioned by one of the big studios and then months, years go by and nothing more is heard of them. So it’s best to be forewarned about the casualty rate, just in case you strike lucky. Even then, however, when the luck does come along, you can’t help feeling that this time it’ll be different. All of which is to introduce the news that I recently got an email from a small film company in Los Angeles asking permission to adapt one of my short stories for the screen. Note that it’s not one of the big boys and, if it happens, it’ll be a short film. But that hasn’t stopped me having a big smile on my face a lot of the time since I read it. Also, from my hovel in Aberdeen, those magic words ‘Los Angeles’ lift me, by association, directly onto a red carpet wearing something by Marchesa, naturally. (Can you get Marchesa stuff in Walmart?) Seriously, it’s very exciting but, equally seriously, I know that lots of things can happen which may turn it all back into a dream. But at least I have an email from Los Angeles.

And the letter I wrote in reply giving permission to adapt the story produced a typo (fortunately spotted before I sent it) which reminded me of another which I’d previously intended to include in a trivia-type blog. You see, for some reason most of my ‘best’ typos involve the keys in the middle of the bottom row – v, b, n. In this case, it was the story’s title, Love Hurts, which in my hurry (and because I have fingers like sausages), became Lobe Hurts – no doubt a romantic tale about either earache or the devastation  occasioned by an overenthusiastic nibbler. The previous one which I was going to mention, though, was much raunchier. I don’t remember what I was writing but it involved something about food and, when I read through it after I’d finished, it had taken on distinct erotic tones because among the other things on the plate were ‘naked beans’.

A writer’s life is full of such simple pleasures.