visions

on ideas you have for years and years

This happened today.

Omg.

Let’s back up.

It’s January, 2019. I’m at my friend Sonia’s apartment for a birthday party. A VISION BOARDING birthday party. I am sure I must have made a vision board before this, but this is the first one I have a real memory of .

me, kate, liz. a lacroix and a table full of magazines. this is somehow the best picture from this night??

I was putting my vision board together. Pictures of dogs and houses and books and the words hot crispy pizza. And I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I woke up and everything on the board came true?” And then I froze - the way you do when you suddenly realize you’ve gotten an idea. “I want to write that!” I yelped, since I was in a roomful of writers, and wanted to lay my claim.

I knew it was a screenplay, not a novel, but I didn’t know anything about the story yet. Or if there was really anything there. But I knew there was the possibility of something. A flash of gold in the river. Maybe pyrite, maybe something valuable. But no way to tell except to go panning. (And now we’re at the end of my mineral knowledge.)

I’d broken the story by the end of February, and was moving fast - apparently I had a draft by March 2019. (I hadn’t remembered this; thank god for PDFs with dates on them.) I continued to work on it, iterate, get notes from brilliant friends, write another draft.

I’d never worked on something like this before - where every draft was SO different than the one that came before. I had my heroine - Emerson Mills - and her vision board that came true. But literally everything else could change from draft to draft.

One of the hardest things was figuring out the magic and how it worked. WHY is there a magic vision board? What are the rules of it? These seem like simple questions; they’re really, really not. It was a LOT of trial and error to figure this out. I watched 13 Going on 30 and Big and I Feel Pretty and 17 Again SO MUCH, taking notes on their structure, looking at the rules of their magic.

I wasn’t working on the script full time - I had other projects, lots of books to write. But I never let it go. There was a new draft in 2020, a whole different draft in 2021.

I kept making vision boards, of course. My friend had another Vision Boarding party in January 2020. I cut out a picture from a magazine that said, Or maybe just stay home. This stopped being so cute two months later when a global pandemic hit!

(was my vision board too powerful?? did it cause the pandemic??)

I started working with producers in 2022, who told me they only had a few minor notes - like could we change the heroine’s job, the love interest’s job, and give her a sibling? These notes spun me out, but in retrospect, they took the story where it needed to go. But! By the time I had figured out the new draft, those producers’ mandates had changed, and we parted ways.

Then this happened.

Suddenly, things were moving again. We had a director, Peter - who I loved, and who gave me amazing notes. But BIG notes. Notes I was initially resistant to. But when I tried them, the script got SO much better, and so much sharper. (And in a very Social Network turn of events, we dropped the “the”. It was cleaner.) We got producers, and an absolute dream lead actress in Lucy attached to play Emerson.

And now here we are. My little vision board script idea, winging its way to France.

I have no idea what will happen to it. Everything could fall apart tomorrow! (I really hope it doesn’t.) Nothing in this business is a done deal until you’re on set, and sometimes not even then.

But it’s been so fun to look back on this - this idea I had SEVEN years ago, and just kept chasing and chasing, until it became sharper and stronger and better than I ever could have imagined.

And OF COURSE I’m still making vision boards.

2025:

why yes it IS laminated.

I had a vision boarding PARTY to kick off 2026; it was a blast. I am planning on having another one next year, and have already started saving magazines.

it was so fun

I’m very proud of 2026’s:

It’s been a ride. And- hopefully - it’s just getting started.

xoxo

MM