Ever wonder how your favorite book becomes a movie or a TV show? Well, wonder no longer because we have brought in a bona-fide filmmaker to explain it.

Lauren couldn’t be with us, but we had our first guest speaker, Barbara Stepanski on in her place. Barbara is an award-winning screenwriter and a director who writes for the show Outlander. 

She had us read Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden as a hypothetical book-to-miniseries project and we had a blast “breaking” the story (that’s Hollywood lingo for a bunch of writers sitting around talking about how to turn a book into a show).

We think we got at least nine episodes out of Morton’s wonderful, century-spanning, ocean-crossing saga. We also discuss how Barbara is attached to adapt Josie’s thriller What She Found in the Woods and how it feels for a writer to see their stories put to screen.

Though we missed Lauren terribly, the gang had such a great time speaking with Barbara that we are thinking of doing this guest speaker thing again real soon.