Read Online Winter Jacket: Finding Home by Eliza Lentzski - Free Book Online

he’s a hot shot because he sold a screenplay,” Gloria noted.
    “Anything I’d recognize?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. Maybe,” Edward shrugged. “It’s one of those fast cars, big explosions, guys with special-agent skills, kind of movies.”
    “Aviva, that tiny thing in the giant emo glasses is the baby of the group,” Gloria continued. “It’s her first time writing for a show, so she’s a little green.”
    I looked toward the woman Gloria referenced. She had her head bent toward the screen of her cell phone and texted while she walked. She reminded me of so many of my millennial students, although I suspected she was about a decade older than them.
    “I guess that makes me the new baby of the group,” I observed aloud.
    “Guillen’s new to the team, too. The network brought him on to punch up the fight scenes and explosions,” Gloria said.
    “Because who needs smart, snappy dialogue when you can just blow things up,” Edward snorted.
    “So that’s the entire team?” I asked.
    “That’s it for the staff writers,” Gloria confirmed, “but you’ll see a few producers float in and out of our meetings periodically with notes for us.”
    “And don’t forget Jane,” Edward noted.
    Gloria groaned. “Yes, and then there’s Jane.”
    I arched an eyebrow. “Do we not like her?”
    “Jane is a creative consultant who sometimes sits in on our brainstorming sessions,” Edward noted.
    “She’s pretty useless—doesn’t contribute much of anything,” Gloria complained. “She’s basically a mole from the network who shoots down ideas she thinks would be too expensive to shoot.”
    “So watch what you say in front of her,” I guessed.
    Edward grinned. “Exactly.”
    We reached the set a few minutes later. I sat in a canvas camping chair along with Troian and the other writers and quietly observed all the moving pieces buzzing around me. Technicians dressed all in black tested the lights and perfected shadows, they moved microphone boom stands around, and checked audio levels, and made sure each setup had continuity from the scene that had been shot before.
    The pilot had been filmed months ago, but in many ways, episodes two and three were more important to the show’s survival. They needed to orient the first time viewers who had missed the pilot while continuing to progress the storyline to hold onto the people who had watched before. In the world of academic writing, we called it repeating yourself but with a difference.
    “I saw you chatting it up with Edward and Gloria,” Troian observed from her chair beside me.
    “Yeah, they were catching me up on all the gossip. Good news though, they seem to like you.”
    Troian rolled her eyes. “Awesome. Because that keeps me up at night.”
    An attractive young woman walked past us and smiled and waved at Troian.
    “That’s our Paige,” Troian said, nodding after the retreating woman. “Her real name is Monica. She absolutely loved the addition of making her character not entirely human, by the way. You should introduce yourself as the person who came up with that idea.”
    “Yeah, okay,” I said, voice wavering.
    Being on set was significantly different than being in Troian’s trailer or even being in the writer’s room. It made me realize that this was a proper television show. My ideas, my words, they would soon be beamed into American living rooms to be absorbed and critiqued.
    “Where are the aliens?” I said under my breath. Everyone on set looked fresh faced and attractive, and I didn’t see Paige’s best friend who was supposed to be a tentacled octopus creature.
    “Makeup and prosthetics cost money,” Troian said. “The network completely changed my vision of the show because they’re not willing to sink money into a program that might not even get a half season.”
    “So no aliens?”
    “They changed the aliens to mutants, kind of like X-Men . You can’t tell the difference between them and the humans now.