Since last weekend I have had the luxury of thinking about only one script for a several consecutive days. It has been great. I may have already mentioned that the script is an adaptation of a Vietnamese novel that I am co-writing with another woman who has actually read the novel (which is in Vietnamese.) But during the writing I started to feel like I wanted a little more sense of place than I was finding on travel sites on the web, and stumbled across The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs. It is the memoir of a woman who spent a cumulative year or so in Hanoi in the early to mid-nineties. This was exactly the kind of thing I needed, since the script is present day–I know the nineties aren’t exactly present day, but in that is is a generation post-war, and the story I am working about is NOT about the war–and the first act takes place in the Old Quarter in Hanoi, which is where she stayed as well. On top of that, her book was a real joy to read. About the only time I get to read these days is on the elliptical machine at the gym, and for several days I looked forward to the gym just because it meant I could read this book.
