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Carol sat in La Bibliothèque Historique de le Ville de Paris and wrote a cover note to yet another industry buddy. He had the power to champion her script about Naomi and Phoebe within the film company he worked for. She was desperate, yet not a whiff of it must enter this note. She pasted a cheerful smile on her face and hoped the chemistry of the smile on her lips would sink deep into the words of this email.
She had a year’s living expenses saved up. She had a shot at being a successful independent screenwriter. She was going for it.
She clicked send. This 1550s building had Wifi, but it was slow, with one hundred other people using it. She knew there were one hundred people because each seat was numbered.
Before you could sit down, you had to register and be given a card with a number on it. In Paris, you sat in your assigned seat and nowhere else.
When her email program said “Sent!” and returned her to her inbox, she saw that another old industry buddy had replied to one of her queries.
“Sorry, Carol, we’re not looking at new properties right now.”
A terse note. An excuse. Or maybe the buddy was too busy to read her script. Or maybe the problem was simply that email was a form that made everyone sound terse. But this guy couldn’t have read her script, not even the first page, he had replied so fast.
Carol had been most hopeful of him buying her screenplay because he was part of the biggest film production company of anyone she knew. She sighed and felt the discouragement.
Well, she could sit like this forever, or keep going. Never, never, never give up, she thought. Thank God for Winston Churchill.
