St. Clare, patroness of both weather and telecom, really pulled through for us on so many, many levels. I’ll be honest: when “produce a book trailer” was included in my contract, I thought, “A book trailer? Nobody watches those things!” But then I figured I’d give it a go and see what happened. I think I told God, “If You want a book trailer, fine, but You will have to make it really easy.”

Guess what He did?

I showed up at choir one night and asked the music director, “Do you know anybody who could do ’80s-style incidental music for a book trailer?” Two months later I got an amazing score from a local group whose contact dude “loves the ’80s and loves soundtracks.”

Then I asked our choral director if she knew anyone who does film editing. Little did I know that her husband does. So I called him to ask what he thought about locations for a shoot, somewhere with a creepy creek. “Well, I’m on a property with a creek right now. I could ask the owners…” The owners agreed.

I sent out a request on some of the local homeschooling email lists I read, asking for two actors. Two hours later I had my actor.

One day after that, the “screaming redhead” we needed walked into our creative writing club. I sat down next to her mom and said, “You have no idea how glad I am that you guys came today…”

I was overloaded with work to prepare for the shooting, including making an ’80s-style CYO basketball jersey. Then my dad’s car broke down and he needed me to drag all 3 kids to come out to my hometown an hour away and help him with transportation. Grumbling, I tried trusting this was all part of the plan. During a bit of down time there, I figured I’d call the shop that used to do the sports shirts for my CYO when I was a kid. Would you believe that Jackets’n’Things of Ambler didn’t have an old CYO jersey hanging around in storage, but they could make me one in less than an hour with no set-up fee, because they just happened to have the old hot press decal (or whatever it’s called) hanging around, even though that CYO hasn’t been in existence for about twenty years?

The weather for our first time block for shooting looked sketchy all week, in the long range forecast: first thunder and rain, then oppressively hot. The morning itself turned out to be sunny and beautiful.

As we were looking for a place for our screaming redhead to cross the creek, a DEER jumps out of practically NOWHERE and leaps across the creek at a PERFECT crossing.

All kinds of weird. All kinds of… well, easy.

So. I’m making a book trailer. I’m planning to have it premier on August 7, 2013 at the Catholic Marketing Trade Show during my time at the Catholic Writers Guild booth.