Anniversary Thank You

Thank you, Jim, for sending me such a heartfelt and sweet email about how you feel about this blog. Thank you countless others who have done the same for the past three years with cards, cupcakes, questions, ideas, frustrations, pleas, jokes and encouragement.

Thank you for reading what I have to say even on days when I didn’t feel too inspired myself. Thank you cheerleaders, thank you detractors, thank you everyone – because you are paying attention to the world of screenwriting, contributing your two cents…and in doing so you bring this blog to life. It’s been over three years of blogging – phew that went by so quickly – and lately I’ve been very occupied with the Just Effing Entertain Me book, which I hope to have published in either late 2010 or early 2011. A normal non-fiction book should clock in somewhere around 60,000 words. When I went through the collected blog entries of The Rouge Wave, AFTER doing some editing, I found that there were 190,000 words. Isn’t that NUTS? So I have a whole lot of editing to do. Which is good as it helps me identify what the core message of The Rouge Wave/Just Effing/Julie Gray is.  The title of the putative book quite literally spells it out but there is also a big heaping spoonful of encouragement and playfulness that comes with just about every post.

Sometime shortly after the first of the year, this blog will live on a much more fleshed out site where readers can find out where to take a workshop from me, buy my book (when the time comes) and get free podcasts, etc. No worries, the URL won’t change.

How far I have come from my little blog three years ago that I used to tap tap out late at night, not knowing if anyone would read it – and now it’s going to be a book and I’m teaching workshops and considering living overseas for awhile just because the wonderful intertubes make that entirely possible. How can you tell I’m not posting this from Istanbul right now Effers? I could (and might) be later this year. This world is truly amazing, isn’t it? I taught my class in Ecuador because a blog reader from Quito hooked that up for me. And I may be teaching at the American University in Cairo because wonderful Samir in Cairo suggests that this may be a good idea and you know by now, Effers, that Samir need not say more because of course I’ll make that happen. A class translated into Arabic. You cannot beat that.

So thank you everyone – you make me feel like a million bucks when you tell me how the blog has been a part of your screenwriting life. You’ve been a part of my life too and you make it much richer by your loyal readership. Here’s wishing everyone an adventurous 2010, filled with a sense of JOY and PLAYFULNESS and GRATITUDE that you are blessed with the gift of expressing yourself in words – it is a rare gift, Effers, and I hope you realize how special each and every one of you are just because you possess it.