Today I’m putting a step back, to let author Anne M. Strick be a guest blogger on I Heart Reading. Anne M. Strick is the author of The Rebel Princess, a contemporary romance novel, but as the pictures below will show you, there’s more to her than that!
Guest Post: What Shall I Write About?
Sometimes writers worry about what their next subject might be. And sometimes that subject is right under their noses. Once in a while, it hasn’t even been written about before.
That is what happened to me. That is where two of my recent books come from: THE REBEL PRINCESS and ALL THE DOORS TO HOLLYWOOD AND HOW TO OPEN THENM. The first is a steamy insider’s skinny about a film company on location in Mexico – and how movies are really made. The second is a series of interviews with those behind-the-screen wizards who make movie magic actually happen. They tell us what they do, how they do it, how they got their first jobs, some adventures they’ve had, and what they love about their work.
The two books derive from my twenty-plus years in the movie industry, working for Universal, Paramount, Warners and EMI, as a Unit Publicist, Project Coordinator and National Publicity Director, and with such Hollywood legends as Jack Nicholson, James Earl Jones, Sean Penn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Lynch, Sting and Dino De Laurentiis, among many others.
The accompanying photos – of me with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Wilt Chamberlain – were in fact taken on the set of the movie CONAN THE DESTROYER, at Churubusco Studios in Mexico. The photographer and I, Time Magazine’s renowned Dirck Alstead,
Halstead, had become buddies on the movie GREYSTOKRE, in Africa – where I’d helped lug his equipment through the mud of Cameroon’s rain forest. And it often amused him, at the end of a day’s shoot, to set up gag shots with me and the principals. (The shot of me with Sting and his fellow villains – in which I look as silly as I felt -was made on the set of DUNE .)
It finally occurred to me that I’d experienced the film business from the inside. I had seen, on a daily basis, the nuts-and-bolts of movie-making; and the riveting and often hilarious dramas of the participants. And that very few people, if any, had written about this curtained world before.
I began to write. I got two books out of it – and perhaps more to come.
So look around you. Look with a fresh eye. Look at your workplace, your volunteer activities, your political or church groups, if any. Look at your parent’s lives, your children’s, your neighbor’s. Look at your doctor’s waiting room and your children’s school. There are ideas, and people interacting in unique environments, everywhere. Indeed, every human relationship is a unique environment. And read your newspaper every day. Be aware of the stories that catch your attention; that stay in your mind and touch your heart. Let them germinate.
And then write. I did!
About The Rebel Princess
Title: The Rebel Princess
Author: Anne M. Strick
Genre: Adult Contemporary Romance
An insider’s first-ever behind-the-scenes scoop on how movies are REALLY made: gritty, grinding, tunnel-vision labor, back-stage intrigue, explosive dramas, parties, and relationships that last a night or a lifetime.
Larger-than-life characters who live life with fervor, while contending with their own inner demons and one another, all in the pressure cooker of a location shoot in the exotic world of Mexico. This romp of a story follows the making of a movie from pre-production through wrap. A hotly passionate love story and a murder elevate the stakes.
About the Author
Anne M.Strick has spent over twenty years in the movie industry. She has worked for Universal, Warners, Paramount and EMI, as a Unit Publicist, Project Coordinator and National Publicity Director, and with such Hollywood legends as Jack Nicholson, James Earl Jones, Sean Penn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Lynch, Sting and Dino De Laurentiis, among many others. She has published theater reviews, articles in Parents Magazine , Frontier and The Nation, and six books: two novels, two self-help books, one memoir (a best-seller in Italy); and a non-fiction, scholarly critique of our adversary trial system. (”remarkable”) . Born in Philadelphia, and educated at Bennington College and UCLA, she lives in Los Angeles.
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