Congratulations Hillary Clinton! #HistoryMade

Congratulations Hillary Clinton! Her nomination win is thrilling, especially given how hard and long she's fought for it. She gave a fabulous speech; full of joy and humor and respect.

It's been a lifetime of fighting for her and she's had the harshest of allegations hurled at her for years and years and years. None of it has been proved but it hasn't stopped coming. Yet she pushed through it all and has triumphed. What an exceptional role model, teaching girls and women in every country that the highest hurdles, the most seemingly insurmountable barriers, can be overcome. Following on from Barack Obama's presidency where he and First Lady Michelle Obama triumphed by pushing through barriers equally impenetrable, equally challenging in every way.

For all its faults, there's a reason why America leads the world. Eight years ago they shattered a glass ceiling and they've done it again. One historic president is going to be followed by another. Historic indeed; on the day Hillary Clinton's mother was born, Congress approved the 19th Amendment allowing women the vote. And now her daughter is the Democratic nominee. Come November she will be the US President.

I'm so looking forward to her taking Trump down. Ironically, the negative exposure she has had for so long is going to work in her favor now; anything he throws at her will be old news, courtesy the GOP and Bernie Sanders and some of his supporters.

But there is a goldmine in Trump's life for Hillary to dig up. And we've already seen that she's the only one who can unseat that terrible man.

I'm going to open a bottle of champagne tonight to celebrate how far women have come. Yes, it matters to me that the next American President will be a woman.

Suck it up, Susan Sarandon! Whether you want to admit it or not you and your vagina are going to benefit from Hillary Clinton's presidency. Though you probably won't be grateful, the majority of Democrats and Independents in America will save you from a Trump presidency and the destruction you so happily said you would welcome if Bernie didn't win.

Over time all the lies that have been fabricated about Hillary Clinton will be exposed, all the conspiracy theories and predictions will come to nothing. She'll make a great president. Barack Obama's outstanding legacy will be honored. And young girls will know that their dreams can become a reality.

An Awfully Chocolate Success Story & A Dream Come True

Here’s a story that will warm the cockles of your chocolate-loving heart and have you lunging for that bar you were saving for the moment when everybody else has gone to bed so you wouldn’t have to share it.

Lyn Lee was a lawyer living in Singapore in the late 1990s, stuck in a 9-5 treadmill of a job that brought a salary in and kept her safe in many ways but didn’t suit her temperament or her lust for life. Cue in a big percentage of the human race here, lawyer or not “Hey, that’s just like me.” And don’t forget all the people who slave at jobs that don’t pay enough to keep them safe, who are also caught in the same dilemma. And who don’t know how to get out of it. From personal experience I know that when you feel trapped it’s easy to believe that if you can’t do something to immediately change your circumstances you might as well do nothing at all.

Here’s where Lyn and a group of like-minded friends did something different. They got together regularly to bounce ideas around of something else they could do with their lives. They didn’t come up with anything but they didn’t stop. So what was the point? The point was, they left the door open.

At the same time this was going on, Lyn was kind of obsessed with finding a dark chocolate cake that had no synthetic flavor and that she could consume without feeling sick afterwards. She trawled Singapore looking for one with no success. She couldn’t believe it. Such a cosmopolitan city and not one single perfect dark chocolate cake?

Hey, why not make one and sell it! It was just a joke at first. When you hear people talk these days about going into business, it’s all about business plans and market research and facts and figures—dry, dead serious. Dead boring. Lyn wasn’t interested in any of that. She and her friends started playing around with recipes, making cake after cake—and eating it! They weren’t even really that serious. From successful but disgruntled lawyer to baker and purveyor of one type of chocolate cake? Ridiculous!

But they kept at it, and messed around in the kitchen for a year, making up recipes. Nothing too scientific, just having fun. Eventually they got it right. The dark chocolate cake that sent them to heaven and didn’t make them feel sick afterwards.

It was still a dumb idea. How can you open a cake shop with only one cake? What if nobody wants it and you’ve got nothing else to offer them? There was nothing sensible about the idea.

Lyn did it anyway. Full of enthusiasm and determination—and  passion for her perfect cake—she opened a shop in 1998 and called it Awfully Chocolate. Her family supported her but nobody expected her to succeed. Yeah, we all know that kind of support. Setting up shop in Singapore was hard; rents were high, competition fierce, businesses came and went at an alarming rate. Lyn was told she was naïve, that she couldn’t just sell what she wanted, it would never work. She had to figure out what other people wanted because that’s what business is about.

Yada yada. Her whole approach was un-businesslike. Everybody believed she was doomed to failure. Three months max they gave her.

They were wrong. For a start Lyn didn’t have any competition at all! And it seems she hadn’t been the only one looking for that perfect dark chocolate cake. Within three months business was booming. And that first shop was just a very unglamorous box. Lyn didn’t advertise, either. In 2004 she opened her second shop. Awfully Chocolate is still thriving and now has franchises in Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Gangzhou, Hangzhou, Nantong and Wuhan. With two products. Chocolate cake and Chocolate ice-cream.

It also has two offshoots now: Nine Thirty by Awfully Chocolate, a restaurant and dessert bar, and Everything With Fries, a cafe.

Lyn Lee broke all the rules, not out of mindless rebellion or stubbornness, but because they didn’t appeal to her and they didn’t make sense. She had a decent career but she needed something more in her life and she listened to her heart. She took it seriously enough to get together with friends and talk about it. Then she had fun with an idea.

Then she did the difficult thing. She flew in the face of everybody’s sensible opinions, established wisdom and well-documented tenets of how to establish a new business. Yet Awfully Chocolate succeeded where high profile, heavily funded shops with sophisticated marketing sometimes fail. Encouraging stuff. But perhaps the most inspiring part of all of this for me is that money and greed were never Lyn’s primary focus and they still aren’t.

“Our philosophy is simple & unique. The focus is not variety but quality. Our product line is deliberately limited—even today. We don't advertise (if we have to pay to say we're good, we're not that good). And we don't hard sell. We let you discover Awfully Chocolate your own way.”

The Perils of Internet Dating

Here’s the thing about reaching a certain age; you realize you’re going to die, and although the day might seem a little hazy and distant, the certainty is an absolute. For me, it’s raised a lot of bracing questions. Like, what am I doing with this moment? Am I just throwing it down the toilet, am I doing something towards the fulfilment of a dream? Am I having fun? Sometimes doing something towards the fulfilment of a dream means taking down-time from everything and not working at all. The fun thing isn't as simple as you'd think, either; sometimes doing what you have to do to get somewhere isn't so much fun. It's all very confusing.

Best but also worst, there isn’t a rule book. On the one hand that makes me a grand adventurer, but on the other, since time rudely marches regardless of what I do, it brings me face to face with the reality that I have to make my choices and that whether they lead to fulfilment or not isn’t something I can know in advance.

Mind you, I do know that the more I pay attention to the idea that I might end up never fulfilling anything, the more I’m like a petrified rabbit caught in the headlights. So since the future is all speculation, I’m learning real quick to give ever diminishing amounts of attention to that idea.

There was a time in my life when my sole yearning was to find a partner I could be real with, who could be real with me. In short, a soul mate. Then I went through a period of realizing that I wasn’t looking for companionship at all, I was just looking for somebody to rescue me from finding my own inner power and making my own choices. So I stopped even thinking about it. I had enough to deal with in learning to understand myself and set a course that could lead me out of the one-horse town that was in my head. I focused on that, and writing and trying to stay engaged in singing and playing piano.

Lately, that strategy has paid off. I got a job in the film industry as a head writer and script editor, I did okay at it, I got paid reasonably and was treated really well. I also wrote a film script that has been made into a film, and co-wrote 2 others that have also been made. They’ll all be screened by a local channel within the next 6 months. They’re low low-budget movies, and nothing much to write home about, but they’re done, they’re mine and they’re a stepping stone. Traction!

It’s funny, I made a bucket list, and “have a script made into a film” was at the bottom! It seemed so unachievable, for two reasons. One, I didn’t believe I could ever do it and two I didn’t believe I could ever do it.

I learned a great lesson: sometimes you know more than you think you do and you’re better at something than you realised. It’s easy to forget how much hard work you’ve done on building a foundation so you can get any kind of traction. It’s easy to forget how hard you had to work at not giving up in the face of no hint of evidence that traction is written into your future. I look back now and realize it was. Not all lessons are horrible. This one is a break out the champagne kind of lesson.

So what has any of this got to do with internet dating? Well, I feel more confident, I guess. Also, lately I’ve gotten curious and the imbalance in my life is something awful. I just don’t know any men, apart from my therapist, my brother and my brother-in-law. Actually, I was curious six months ago, and I signed up with a site. There were two guys that I wanted to at least meet. One was an American, hallo. Photos of him on a horse galloping through the snow! He’s articulate, seemed open-minded and hearted. The other was very different, barely said anything about himself. But what he said was very real. I liked that. How can you tell that somebody is articulate when they don’t say much? I don’t know, I was just pretty sure of it.

Anyway I lost courage and didn’t message them. A couple of weeks ago they came back to mind. Enough with the procrastination, I told myself, I’ll just say hi, I thought. How hard can that be?
I signed back in, and found them both. And oh. Not so easy. In short, I wanted to run again. But I didn’t. I looked at both their profiles quite a few times, trying to reassure myself they were human and ordinary like me. Am I ordinary? Then, heart thumping I messaged them both. I don’t see the point of online chatting when you can actually meet, because anybody can say anything with online chatting. I’m kind of a reality gal when I’m not fantasizing about Hollywood.

So all I said was “Hi, would you like to meet for coffee?” I was so sure they’d both say “sure thing”, because they both said they were looking for anything, which includes friendship, right? That’s where I want to start. It seemed like it would be fun to talk to both of them, and everybody I know says I’m fun to talk to.

Anyway. Neither of them replied. Ouch, that was really horrible. One of them, my second choice, is online all the time, so I know he got my message. I wanted to ask him “hey, what’s the matter with you? Why didn’t you reply?” The other – well, I don’t think he visits the site any more. But here’s the embarrassing thing. I’ve realized that I can see who’s looked at my profile. So that means they can both see I looked at their profile a gazillion times before getting up the courage to send a message. What if they think I’m a stalker?

I’ve thought about sending a short message to say I’m not one but then they could interpret that as me trying to get their attention. Which would make me more of a stalker. If only I could find a way to point them to my blog, then they’d see how clever and witty and fun and unstalky I am.

Sigh. Didn't somebody write a book about fear of flying? Or was that about sex? Not going there.

Boiled Frogs and Original Sin

Is it an urban myth/metaphor or a reality? That if you stick a frog in a pot of water and heat the water gradually the frog’s capacity to adapt will be its downfall. Not realizing it’s in danger, it will be boiled to death. Leaving aside the gruesome possibility of this ever having been a real life experiment, it’s not a bad metaphor for adult behaviour. We get stuck in a comfort zone that starts out looking and feeling just fine, and keeps us materially provided for. It requires a whole lot of compromises but they seem small at first and perfectly manageable.  

Some part of us is in protest but we don't hear it. Or if we do, there’s always the future. I’ll just do this for a while then I’ll change and do something really worthwhile. 

The days, weeks, months and years pass. At some level the compromises become increasingly painful and unbearable but instead of listening to the pain and taking it seriously, we say things like It’s not so bad. I shouldn’t complain. I can’t complain. I should be grateful. Don’t worry be happy. Be positive. We feel quite heroic when we do that. Responsible. Accountable. Unselfish. Healthy members of society. 

Healthy? I'm not so sure. Afraid, maybe. Still so controlled by an atavistic fear of having no food and shelter that we can't embrace that our survival requires more than that now. It requires nurturing the heart and soul.  

Growing up Catholic, I rebelled strongly against the idea of original sin. Nobody could explain in any way that sounded remotely intelligent to me. I've come to see that probably our capacity to not listen to the most important part of us is what it's about if you strip it of the moralism. Sin is an archery term, meaning to miss the mark. Original sin is our capacity to miss the mark – which is pretty much what languishing in a comfort zone that doesn’t feed your heart and soul and mind in a balanced way is. Alongside judging those who are least trying to not die the slow crucifying death.

I can’t imagine that boiling frogs was ever a real experiment. Even if some psychopath did decide it would further the understanding of human nature, they would have had to slow-boil hundreds of thousands of frogs to be able to reach any kind of significant conclusion, since one frog doesn’t equal every frog. Just as in a tank of fish the majority will swim round and round in the same direction but a few will swim in the opposite direction, it’s probable that most frogs would boil to death but some would leap out as soon as the water started getting warm.

I doubt there’s a human being who wouldn’t look at those few and believe they were at the forefront of frog-evolution. But when people behave in the same ways as those clever, evolved frogs would if the experiment really happened, our reactions aren’t so simple. 

Some humans are a whole lot more finely tuned than others. They feel what’s happening within themselves, they see what’s happening in others. They register emotions and discomfort far more quickly than many others do. A whole world is visible to them that others are oblivious to. The kind of compromise that others will feel comfortable with for a while - and regret most horribly later on - is like torture to them immediately. They instinctively understand the danger. They make different choices in life which we often see as risky. But that’s only if we don’t see what they’re protecting. If we don’t see that they’re like those frogs that jump when the water is just getting warm. We don’t even consider whether in fact they’re taking less of a risk than we are. 

If they find a way to be materially safe in the world and even materially wealthy, we make heroes out of them. We look up to them as leading the way, following their heart, inspiring us. We write books and make movies about them; we make them our role models and aspire to be just like them. Or we tell ourselves we’d like to. We hold on at least to the fact that it is a humanly possible thing to follow your heart and succeed. We hold onto that light in our darkest hour.

What if they don’t do so well? Do we still recognize that at least they’re following their heart, or trying to? Do we look to them for inspiration?

It’s a rhetorical question. We’re more likely to criticize them for being irresponsible, selfish, freeloaders. We turn our backs on them; judge them for not being more like us, for not being willing to make the sacrifices we make. We do it especially if we’re slowly boiling away in boiling frogland. Even more especially if we don’t have the courage and honesty to acknowledge it.  

Or else if we help them we do it believing ourselves to be the heroes. We seldom let them forget how magnanimous we are and how much they're in our debt. Whatever we do with it, we hold onto the idea that we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. We're at the forefront of evolution and they're trailing behind us. Even though our choices are eroding our lives faster than the speed of light. Yet imagine if we recognized that in many ways they’re ahead of us. Imagine if we embraced them, not from the perspective of how much we can do for them, but of how much we can learn from them about how not to slow-boil yourself to death. Imagine that.

How to be Successful as a Screenwriter

When you’re learning to write a screenplay, or you’re writing your first or your whatever, and you have no experience or contacts in the movie world but you’re passionate about your work and you have a powerful dream, you’re pretty vulnerable. You tend to believe anything anybody tells you so long as they do it convincingly.

You’re easy pickings for self-styled authorities who earn a grand living with books or lectures or seminars on how to write the perfect screenplay, how to avoid the mistakes that amateurs make. Who tell you that unless you write the perfect screenplay you won’t be able to sell it. And they of course know how to identify that perfection and formularize it. They make it sound so cut and dried.

You think – right! All I have to do is do what they tell me and I’ll be able to write the perfect screenplay and I’ll be made. QED, Quite Easily Done, as a mad Maths teacher once told me with a scary giggle. Better get onto that Oscar speech.

The vulnerability of scriptwriters not confident in their own judgment, humble enough and willing to learn and desperate to succeed has made for a giant sector within the movie industry. There’s everything right and nothing wrong with learning from pros, but it’s the gurus who believe they have plumbed the depths of the success formula and who seamlessly forge a connection between what they can teach you at a goodly price – or simply for their ego trip - and you being able to sell your screenplay that gets my goat.

If they’ve so got their finger on the success pulse, why are so many terrible scripts made into films? Here’s the reality: there’s no formula to success in selling your screenplay.

Take this scenario: you write a screenplay, you hand it to an editor. They tell you to throw it in the dumpster, there’s nothing of any value in it. You follow their advice. Well that’s the end of that, isn’t it? The next day you retrieve it and show it to another editor. They think it has merit but you need to change the sex of your protagonist. You don’t want to, so you show it to another editor, who says the sex of the protagonist is fine, but you need to change the storyline and they tell you how.

If you were to follow their advice you’d of course be ghostwriting their screenplay. But you follow it anyway, because you’re a novice and they know what they’re talking about. Or that’s what you believe. Eventually you write something that pleases this editor. You don’t feel as passionately about it as you did your original story. But you get to show it to a producer. Who doesn’t like it, says the story doesn’t feel authentic. You take a risk and say actually it’s not. The producer asks what you mean. You tell them, you originally wrote a different storyline altogether. The producer says what was it? You tell them. They like it.

As it happens, this is a true story. The writer was a South African, the producer from New York. The writer had attended a very prescriptive course and was told unless he changed his screenplay completely he didn’t have a chance in hell of it ever being read by a producer. He’d be lucky if it ever made it to the pile of reading matter in any producer’s toilet.

You can’t formularize why somebody succeeds and somebody doesn’t. You can read screenplays that you think are brilliant – and that probably somebody else thinks are dreadful – and learn what you can from them. You can study the craft, and structure that goes back to Greek plays. You can study people in depth so that your work reflects your insight. But, some people want that in films, some people don’t get it and don’t care. Or you can not understand people at all, and write something childish and shallow. Some will love it, some will hate it. You can please some but you can’t please all, no matter what you do.

Robert de Niro said once about auditioning that it’s pointless trying to impress the director. The best you can do is forget about impressing anybody, but just do the best you can. Be as authentically you as possible, because that’s where your greatest strength lies. I thought it was pretty good advice for any kind of creative enterprise.

Once you’ve done your best with a screenplay, you can show what you’ve written to anybody you want, but how do you know that any suggestions they make will make your work better or more marketable? You don’t. The impact of art in any form is totally subjective; there is no ultimate good or bad, especially with movies. Personally, I think it makes sense to do the best you can, then set about doing the best you can to sell it to a producer. If one says yes, I’ll buy it and here’s the money but I want you to change something, then if you want the money you can say fine, I’ll change it, when the money’s in my bank account.

Otherwise, you’re kind of pissing into the wind by changing things because other people think you should. You could spend your whole life trying to ‘perfect’ one screenplay. Better to write a score of less than perfect and try and sell them, and learn by your own experience how to be more powerful in what you want to say in your writing and in pitching to producers. Whether that power actually creates success or not I can’t say, but I do know it impacts on people. It’s kind of an animal thing.

Here’s what else I know; writing a screenplay is a huge amount of work. I can’t imagine anything worse than spending my whole life writing to try and please somebody else but never pleasing myself. And imagine if I never sold anything anyway. What a total waste of a life that would be.