At the begining of my career, I wrote fictional narratives and imagined myself writing romance novels. However, after seeing shows like Grey's Anatomy and Sex in the City, I wanted to be a television writer. The medium of television allowed a storyteller to create characters that lived on with the audience for years, and that appealed to me. So, after writing a bunch of short stories that did well on my self-hosted me.com page, I moved to Los Angeles and pursued television writing.
I was lucky enough to be a writer in the television industry in what may have been the greatest time ever. Mad Men, House of Cards, Sopranos, Entourage, and so many other epic television shows launched from CAA, where I worked as an assistant to a deep-rooted agent. After that, I moved over to a coveted primetime network writing staff job. I cut my teeth on the shows Brothers and Sisters and Dirty Sexy Money at ABC. Those were precisely the types of shows I moved to Los Angeles to write - character-driven, twenty-two-episode ensembles with legs.
After those jobs, I wrote a show called Hit The Floor and literally lived my dream. Hit The Floor was a character-driven show that I wrote on for six years. The HTF characters visited homes worldwide, every Monday night, week after week for 40+ episodes. I grew up watching The OC and then Gossip Girl. I welcomed Seth Cohen and Blair Waldorf into my home weekly for nearly a decade. (IYKYK)
But now, with streaming, shows air six to ten episodes, and then we don't see them again for years. Or, they air one or two seasons consecutively (the length of an executive's contract) and then the show is canceled. My goal was always to return to New England and to my roots of fictional narrative. I just thought I would be an old lady when it happened, not a mother of two elementary school-aged children. Nevertheless, my husband and I packed up and moved to New Hampshire last month.
My goal is to continue to get paid to write screenplays, original television pilots, adaptations, and features, but I no longer feel the need to be in Los Angeles to do it. If I were to join the staff of a show, it would likely only be for a short period, and I could stay in an Airbnb. Year-round jobs like Fire Country or Law and Order (New York-based) have become unicorns, where they were once the norm . I feel like my creativity, sanity, and writing will flourish amongst nature and family, but only time will tell!
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