Dangerous Creatures and Horrible Setbacks This is not the first time that one of my novels has been optioned for film or TV. The first one, The White Mare, was optioned by a production company called New Century Communications right after my book had sold to Bantam Books. The New Century people took it to Hollywood, where it was shown to a number of film production companies. One of these, called Circle Films, optioned the book and hired several screenwriters and tried to get a writer to make a film script from the story. They didn't, so the option lapsed. Eventually the company wound up in Chapter Eleven. The other option was handled by a New York producer named David Giler. When David died, his daughter, Sharon Osbourne, took over and decided she wanted to do a film instead of a TV series. That's a whole other saga I don't have room for here. Another script was written by a former student of mine. I don't remember his name. I think he had been an editor at the American Playhouse. He had come to the same conclusion that I had: most novels were much too long to make it as a full-length movie. The film option never got off the ground, although the script was put on a shelf by some producers for some time. At one time, it was going to be made as a six-part miniseries with HBO. Now there's a new production company, Imaginary Road, that is developing the option of The White Mare and another of my books, The Dark Side of the Sun, with a view toward filming them as a mini-series. They hope to begin production in late summer or early fall, but that is not certain at this time. I'm glad that my books have been considered worth filming, but there is a lot of hurdle-jumping involved between an idea and production. First, you have to find the money to film it. Then you need to convince the producers that your book would sell and that they can make a profit on it. And you have to be lucky. In the 1980s, while I was living in San Francisco, I had this idea for a movie of my own. I was living in an attic apartment in a large house with two other writers, and one day one of them discovered an old typewriter in the basement. It was a portable Underwood with a black carriage, with dings and scratches all over it. The writer tried to sell the typewriter on Craigslist, but he didn't get much of a response. After a while, he told me about his little find, and I mentioned that I had an idea for a movie based on this typewriter, which was about a typewriter. He said, "You know, you could write a script, sell it to someone in Hollywood, and make a movie out of your script for about a million bucks." I thought it was a terrific idea. I wrote it all down, then took the typewriter home, put it in a brown bag, and stored it away in my attic bedroom. Then I quit typing on my electric typewriter and went back to using a computer. A year later, the guy went back to the basement, looked through the old typewriter, and discovered it was gone. "Where did you get the typewriter?" he asked the other writer. "Some guy came by here, and he said you'd taken it." The other writer thought about it for a moment, then asked, "You mean, there was more than one person who was offered the typewriter? You can't make a movie of a typewriter." And there you have it. If Hollywood could get enough investors for the project, I did have a script that was halfway done. But if it had been successful, it might not have been so good. I never wrote another book that had anything to do with typewriters. In the meantime, I was writing books on different topics. I created a world for The Dark Side of the Sun that was filled with dinosaurs and strange, extinct animals. I took the name of the book from a rock group that consisted of two brothers: Dave and Alan Brown, and their drummer, Kenny Aaronson. I used the song "Dark Side of the Sun" in my novel. At one time, I thought of putting together a project about them, but eventually, I put it on the shelf and went on to my next project. Today, I hope they've found a typewriter that will actually turn into a script. # Chapter Eleven "I Was Just Hoping to Make Something of Myself" After I had written The White Mare, another book on my Nightmares from the Deep trilogy was published. This was a sequel called Mermaid. The sequel came about because I had a short story, called "The Secret of the Mermaids," published in the summer of 1998 in an issue of Playboy magazine. I was thrilled, and then I thought, "I have to write a novel about this." I just went ahead and wrote it. There was more to Mermaid than you would expect. Because I wanted to make it a standalone novel instead of a long series, I ended up including the characters from The Shadow World as well as others from my Nightmare series. They all come together, including Jack, the fisherman who was looking for treasure in a sea cave. The Nightmare series had reached about 15 books by the time I published Mermaid. As far as I know, no one connected to the Nightmare series is aware of Mermaid. While I can only guess as to how this would turn out, I'm sure it would not be as well received by fans of the series. But if I tried to make a new Nightmare series, with a prequel and all, it would not be as good as Mermaid. The characters are much better for coming together as a team in one of my books. In one of my books, I had suggested that if you held your breath for a long time, a bubble might form around your head and make you invisible. I knew the thought of a bubble on your head was ridiculous, but I didn't want to write a boring fantasy novel. That was a big reason why I came up with Mermaid. There was also the issue of my grandfather's secret message, which had been found hidden in the floorboards of a small house in the Mojave Desert. I put that into the book, too, and then added some other secret messages to the book as well. Just as in The White Mare, there are some hidden gems that were found on an old typewriter in the early 1980s. It was an old Blickport Underwood. I also included a recipe for peanut brittle. If you're a reader of Nightmare on Elm Street, you already know where it was. A friend told me once that the movie version of Nightmare on Elm Street went through a number of drafts. If so, the book was probably written during one of these drafts. This was probably an important factor when it came to the idea of the sequels, since they were written to keep things fresh and exciting for fans, while putting in a couple of special touches to make it appear to be unique. The original Nightmare was written on a typewriter and it's still fresh after all these years. The sequels gave it the appearance of being a brand new movie. After my last two Nightmare movies came out, Mermaid became one of my best-selling novels. The Nightmare series is one of my best-selling novels. There are so many fans of the Nightmare series that I'm still hearing from fans who met me at one of the signings I did. People will be on vacation, then they'll go to a bookstore and they'll see me and run up and ask to have their picture taken with me. They show up at book signings and they ask me to sign something, then they take a picture with me. And they say, "You know, I was just hoping to make something of myself." One writer who came up to me and explained that he used to drink heavily. He said he had been in rehab a couple of times. One day I noticed a book under his arm that he said was the book that finally gave him the courage to stop drinking. I looked at it and said, "That's great! I just met someone who was a big fan of mine. It really means a lot to you to be talking to me." He nodded and gave me a sheepish smile. Some fans ask for autographs, and if they're really fans, they know enough to read the "autographs only" sign. It would be sad to lose a fan who comes up to me, and if they're a real fan of mine, it would be like having someone cut off my right arm. But that's a risk I have to take. As for myself, I'm certainly happy that Mermaid came to be. Of all the manuscripts I've written, it is one of my favorites. It's just a shame that I'm working on another novel now instead of working on a novel based on Mermaid. I'm sure that it will become another cult book someday. I always said that I wasn't sure how popular The Shadow World might become, but I hoped it might make a million-dollar sequel someday. Mermaid is doing just that.