Carleen Brice

People ask me all the time what it was like to have a movie made from my novel. Well, I wrote an essay about it for The Defenders Online.

Here is an excerpt:

"It is 2002, 2003, 2004 or 2005 and I am listening to Jill Scott’s song, Try, a lot. I’m writing my first novel while holding down a job, and editing an anthology about black women and midlife.

My novel-in-progress doesn’t even have a title. I know the story—it’s about how a formerly alcoholic woman and her adult daughter face their past. But I don’t know how to write a novel. I’m taking classes and workshops and reading a lot of other novels and books about writing. But it takes writing a draft a year for four years before I teach myself how to write a novel, how to tell a story. At least this story.

Writing a novel isn’t digging ditches or picking cotton, but it’s hard. And it tests your spirit all day almost every day. Will I get an agent? Will I get a publisher? And if I do, will people like what I write? Hell, will anyone else ever read it or will it turn out that I’ve only been talking to myself?

I listen to Jill Scott’s inspiring song, Try, to keep my spirits up while on my “writing walks,” or en route to a job I wish I didn’t have to go to because I’d rather be communing with this mother and daughter coming to life in my book than doing just about anything else in the world.

Flash forward to 2009. I’m waiting in a Vancouver, British Columbia, hotel room to go to dinner with my husband. That novel I struggled over became Orange Mint and Honey, published in 2008 by One World/Ballantine. And tomorrow—just a year later—I am going to meet singer-actress Jill Scott, who is starring in Sins of the Mother, the Lifetime TV movie version of Orange Mint and Honey."

The entire essay can be found at the link below, where you'll also find links to articles and reviews about the movie.