Priorities!

From the Miss M Cam - she took a LOT of pictures of the craft service table

The trailer shoot… was AWESOME.  Beyond awesome.  It was Awesome-cali-fragilistic-awesome-alidocious!

Many, many stories to tell, including — but oh, not limited to:

Friday night setup — Miss M telling everyone her favorite planet is "Uranus," then making sure everyone got it by adding, "My favorite planet is my butt!"

Miss M topping that off by bursting into an original song called "My Momma Sucks It Sucks It"  (don't ask… I have no idea…)

Every lick of electricity blowing out in the middle of the shoot on Saturday, until Ben Tully, grip/actor/master electrician/P-90X poster boy/superman took apart the house circuitry and somehow fixed it.

Our 18-year-old actress busting out Michael Sambello, Justin Bieber, and The Spice Girls on her iPod.

A large chunk of dry ice tossed into my swimming pool… to fabulous effect.

I'll elaborate in the following days, but I wanted to talk about something that happened today.

As visitors to this blog know, I've been talking about my quest to run the L.A. Marathon, despite a horrible lack of training.  It's not as insane a goal as it might seem, because I've run fifteen marathons, so I have the muscle memory.

As I said here, the race was important to me because no matter how slowly I ran it, it would be a concrete accomplishment I could hold up — literally, with the medal around my neck — and say I DID THIS! And even though work has been piling up for me like a snowdrift at my sister's house in Connecticut this winter, I still wanted to do it.

Then today I get an email.  Cristian, my Behind-the-Scenes footage guy, can get us into a recording studio to do the voiceover session for the trailer… for free!  The only catch?  It's this Sunday, during the L.A. Marathon.

I said yes immediately.  Much as I'd love to run this race, I'd love to have a fantastic book trailer way more.  It's far more important to me to ride the incredible momentum from the shoot into this weekend, and have a knock-it-out-of-the-park trailer and some great additional footage to start sharing with everyone.  There are plenty of marathons, but I have only one shot at a debut novel, and I want to make the most of it.

So I won't be running the marathon on Sunday, but I will get to see Cristian, Travis (co-producer/editor/director), and Clare (actress) again, plus a few other great voiceover actors, and I'll get one step closer to having a fantastic, completed book trailer about which I can shout from the rooftops.

What's interesting to me is that when I gave up a training run because of a migraine, I felt like the biggest loser on the planet.  Giving up the actual marathon for a voiceover session?  I feel terrific.  Easiest choice I've ever made.  It makes me want to ask everyone out there…

Have you ever had a goal you truly wanted to achieve… then given it up guilt-free because of changed circumstances?  What were the circumstances, and how did changing your path turn out to be the best thing (assuming it did)?

More to come on the trailer…

xo,

E