I Was Never Going to Write Sensibly

There is a chance I never stood a chance. I was raised, spiritually if not nutritionally, on a steady diet of Nutella, melodrama, Beverly Hills, 90210 and Baywatch. My earliest education in love came with saxophones, ceiling fans, and curtains billowing harder than in a Bonnie Tyler video. So perhaps it is not surprising that I have never been particularly interested in moderation. Maybe it is no wonder, then, that I keep drifting towards women who are hungry, angry, lucid, excessive, and inconvenient. Women who want things they are not supposed to want. Women for whom desire is never harmless, because culture has rarely allowed female desire to remain merely desire. It becomes punishment, spectacle, diagnosis, moral lesson. Throughout my entire upbringing, I only ever saw that story end one way: with a woman cutting off her hair in quiet resignation, losing her mind, or throwing herself off a cliff. It is a tale as old as time. Want too much, and the narrative will correct you. That is why the final girl is always - a virgin. And obviously I resent that. I am interested in desire, yes, but not as decoration. Desire is never only erotic. It is social. It is political. It is architectural. It exposes the beams beneath the room. It reveals who has power, who is performing, who is lying, and who has spent her whole life being told that wanting something makes her dangerous. Somewhere between the operatic excess of Meat Loaf, the erotic haze of Zalman King, the female disillusionment of Elizabeth Wurtzel, and the dark intelligence of Angela Carter, I seem to have found my natural habitat. A ridiculous place to stand, admittedly. But here we are. This is also why I keep returning to period pieces, despite being told by other screenwriters that I do not exactly make life easy for myself by writing them. They are expensive. Fine. Tragic. Let the budget sheets weep. But the past is charged in a way I keep coming back to. The rules were stricter. The corset was tighter. A misplaced word could ruin a woman. A look could become evidence. Reputation was not a social inconvenience, but a blade held against the throat. Maybe it began with Willoughby breaking my heart in Sense and Sensibility and leaving behind a lifelong suspicion that longing is never simply longing. It is class. It is gender. It is fantasy. It is performance. That, to me, is where stories begin. So this blog will not be a soft beige corner of the internet where I politely document my writing life. It will be a place for obsession. For women who refuse to be reduced to cautionary tales. For the ornate, the vulgar, the historical, the erotic, the haunted, the excessive. For all the places where culture tries to discipline the female body and then acts surprised when it bites back. Restraint has had centuries to make its case. In the gilded words of David Lynch - "Okay, let's try that again but this time good".