For the last month, I've been home alone with the dog while my wife and daughter were visiting the in-laws in France. On Monday, a day before my family was set to return, our water heater cracked and flooded several rooms in our house. I spent much of Monday and Tuesday dealing with the plumbers, insurance adjusters, and disaster-cleanup people. My weary family came home Tuesday to a bunch of a torn-open walls, half-a-dozen fans going, and no hot water. For the last few days, we have been dividing our time between our house and a nearby hotel, where we have been showering. Insurance is covering most of the clean-up and repairs (and the hotel, of course), but it has still been an enormous inconvenience. We'll have hot water on Tuesday…but today we uncovered more water damage today, so the disaster crew opened up more walls and more fans were brought in.
In the midst of all this, I had two pitch meetings last week…one face-to-face (a pilot pitch), and one over Skype to studios overseas (a feature pitch). I don't know how the pitch here turned out, but the overseas pitch was a home-run. It's for an international action movie, a co-production between a European studio and a Chinese studio. The movie will be shot in Europe and China. We closed my deal on Friday and I've spent the last few days plotting the story in detail for another meeting this week…when I could get the greenlight to write the script. It's all happening very fast…and I like it that way. It reminds me of network television.
In the midst of all this, I've had to temporarily set aside my MONK book, which I must get back to next week as well, no matter what happens with the movie script. But I am over 100 pages into it, so I'm feeling pretty secure that there won't be a problem meeting my deadline. Afterall, I wrote MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE while I was writing, producing, and shooting FAST TRACK: NO LIMITS in Germany…and I completed DIAGNOSIS MURDER: THE WAKING NIGHTMARE while I was writing & producing the TV series MISSING…with two broken arms. The truth is, I do my best work under pressure.
Fantastic. Great stuff on the movie deal. Hope the pilot pitch works out, too. And maybe the cracked water heater will show up in a Monk novel. It’s great to see there are opportunities for international movie business!