The Live Journal of James Stevens-Arce

I don't have time to go into detail, but I will say that the Friday-through-Sunday story development workshop I attended week before last at the annual NALIP Conference under Harrison Reiner and Marilyn Atlas's extremely effective professional mentorship proved to be an intense, dynamic, inspiring, exhilarating, productive, and invaluable experience.

I met a talented bunch of fellow aspiring screenwriters and return eager to finish developing a new storyline for my film adaptation of the local stage musical El Bombón de Elena.

Now that my 19th-century action-adventure coming-of-age novel Blind Man, Preacher Man is in my agent's hands, I'm currently:

• working on the third draft of my contemporary noir crime fiction novel Sins of the Heart,

• collaborating on a screenplay adaptation of an original stage musical in Spanish titled El Bombón de Elena (which would translate, roughly, as Elena's Candy, with the intentional double meaning of "the candy that belongs to Elena" and "Elena is herself like candy"), which the head of the local PBS station is convinced could be "the Puerto Rican Oklahoma" (only with salsa music), and

• excerpting and adapting a couple of 5,000-word adventure short stories featuring a 15-year-old female protagonist from Blind Man, Preacher Man with hopes of selling them to Cicada Magazine (working titles: Annabelle Fahey and the Comanche Raid and Annabelle Fahey and the Great Match Race.

I've also got to do my income tax.