The latest novel by award-winning Tasmanian author and academic Danielle Wood could be made into a television series.
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Dr Wood said the screen rights for Star-Crossed have been sold to Stampede, a new production company for Greg Silverman, the former head of Warner Brothers Pictures.
“An Australian script-writer has been engaged to write a six-part limited series for pay television,” she said.
“It’s important to remember, though, that lots of books are optioned but never make it to the screen.
“It’s a cruelly uncertain business, but the signs for Star-Crossed are good.”
Dr Wood, who is a journalist and lecturer at the University of Tasmania, won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2002 with her first book, The Alphabet of Light and Dark.
Star-Crossed was written under the name Minnie Darke and is already being well-received and is being published in 19 languages.
“Some of the books in my head seem to belong to ‘me’, and some seem to belong to Minnie. I think I’m a bit more serious, while she’s a bit more fun,” Dr Wood said.
The idea for the book came when Dr Wood was working as a journalist at a suburban newspaper.
“Because our staff was so small, it ended up being practical for me to have quite a powerful log-in that gave me access to the layout of the whole publication,” she said.
“I remember working late one night, with the horoscopes open on my screen, thinking, ‘I could just…
“And, I’m not saying I definitely ever did tweak the astrologer’s words, but the idea that I could never left me; I knew there was the kernel of a novel in it.”
Dr Wood said recently, after just finishing Star-Crossed ,she met a former colleague who she told about the novel.
“I saw a blush creeping up his neck," she said.
"Then, he confessed to me that when he’d been a young journalist, he’d pursued the woman of his dreams – an Aries – by rewriting her horoscopes in a newspaper for which he was the sub-editor.
"I’m happy to be able to report that he did, in time, marry her.”
Dr Wood is working on Minnie Darke’s next novel, which is not a sequel, but another stand-alone novel.
“Again, it’s about the unseen forces in life that shape our destiny, but this time it’s not astrology, but music, at the centre of the plot,” she said.
She says Star-Crossed is AusRom’s book of the month, QBD Books book of the month and been featured on Apple iBooks Australia's ‘What to Read in March’.
New York Times best-selling author of One Day in December, Josie Silver, described Star-Crossed as "a total triumph."
"So, it seems to be tracking pretty well," Dr Wood said.
For the record, Dr Wood is a Leo but says Minnie Darke is a Gemini.