It Couldn't Have Happened to a Nicer Gal!

I don’t spend a lot of time with my local newspaper these days. I follow mostly the national and international news via Yahoo and the major TV networks. But we do get the Sunday edition of our local paper, The Stamford Advocate, and I like to read the Arts section because it covers the author/book writing market.

Tonight, I finally got around to picking up last Sunday’s Arts section and got quite a surprise. There on the section’s front cover was a photo of Lisa Marie Peterson — a former staff reporter for the paper.

We used to work there together — I worked in Ad Sales, she in editorial — two departments with an invisible Berlin Wall between them — but for at least a year or two, the two departments were inseparable outside the office, hanging out at the guys’ softball games on Tuesdays, the girls’ on Thursdays. We also played together on another corporate team that summer.

Also, her (then) boyfriend Jim lived in a house with a bunch of guys who played in a band. The something Cats. Fat Cats? Wild Cats? It was so long ago. They had a beach party in the middle of winter and filled the living room with sand, then turned the heat up and everyone walked around in shorts, sandals and Hawaiian shirts, with sunglasses on and sunscreen on the tips of their noses. That I remember like it was yesterday.

Anyway, I digress. So Lisa Marie, who was once a local staff reporter (and a very nice person), eventually left here to work for the Bergen Record, a hefty-sized New Jersey paper, then at one point I caught her on the front side of a television camera as a TV reporter somewhere, and that was the last I had heard of her. And every once in awhile, I would think back and wonder what she was doing. Now I know. She packed up, moved to Hollywood, had a baby girl and, oh yeah, tried to break into the really competitive field of screenwriting. But here’s the punch line: she succeeded!

Have you seen the previews for a movie called Gracie? A story of a girl who fought all the odds to play on a boys soccer team? Well, Lisa wrote the screenplay!!! And according to the article in The Advocate (by Beth Cooney), she also writes for Law & Order SVU, where she won an Edgar Allen Poe award for mystery writing.

I never knew she had these kind of aspirations, but I’m so happy for her. She also said something very interesting in the article that I completely agree with. She said she wanted to be a novelist but she wasn’t any good at it. She says that “books, movies, sitcoms, dramas and plays are very different crafts. That writers who are good at plays are surprisingly good at sitcoms but a best-selling novelist who tries her hand at adapting her story to the screen will fail miserably. I couldn’t agree more. I write novels but have never felt the calling, nor the talent, to write a screenplay. She, on the other hand, writes screenplays, but can’t write novels.

Lisa Marie deserves this success and I’m thrilled for her. Way to go Lisa Marie!!!

To read the Advocate article:
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/features/scn-sa-gracie2jun10,0,6705407.story