Let me tell you the type of person I am, and I'd like to see if you're able to conclude why I like to write comedies based on historical or scientific facts.
Depending on that, you'll love or hate working with me.
Here's my life script!
“Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic.” — J.K. Rowling.
True. But as a kid, I wasn’t exactly casting spells.
I had mutism. For the first five or six years of my life, I didn’t say a single word. Not one syllable. If I wanted something, I just pointed. My parents panicked. Doctors warned them, “If wee John doesn’t speak soon, he might never speak again.”
Cut to: one random school day. My dad drops me off, dead quiet, as usual, and picks me up, talking. Nobody knows what happened, least of all me, but I haven’t stopped since. Speech therapy followed, plus years of learning not to point at everything.
School wasn’t exactly a Hollywood montage. Social anxiety, ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder without hyperactivity), and undiagnosed dyslexia made every subject a battle scene. After barely surviving education, I became a gardener. Loved it, but something was missing in my life.
Then, I met Silvia (my wife, best friend, ruthless editor of this and future scripts, and chief motivator to keep me going despite all my limitations). With her gentle persuasion... Well, fine! Scary, forceful encouragement, because I couldn't avoid anything uncomfortable. She made me do it all. So, I enrolled in a Psychology degree at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland) after many years of studying the adult education program to enter University. Finally, I obtained my qualification at the "early age" of 35. Soon after, I also worked hard to become a BABCP accredited Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapist.
My dyslexia is so severe that the University had to arrange a note-taker. The poor woman had to sit beside me for 3 years, 5 days a week, quite a few hours a day. I couldn't even take notes of the lectures. I always needed extra exam time and permission to type (thank God, because my handwriting could be worse than a doctor who forgot how to spell). I had always believed that I was stupid and inadequate. All my decisions have proven to me that I was wrong!
I finally graduated with honours, became a business partner in the successful practice of my wife, Dr. Silvia Buet Gonzalez, also a Psychologist, Marketing specialist, EMDR, and Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapist. Now, I help people overcome all difficulties that I used to have, plus treat challenging cases of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), particularly those with pure obsessions. Talking had become my full-time job. Not bad for a kid who once couldn't even utter a word, right?
So far, humans can’t change the past. Writing The Spacesuit didn’t change my childhood, my dyslexia, my relentless wife, or my professional choices.
But it changed my future.
Now I want to write screenplays about psychological issues that are hard to face, and about historical and scientific facts that could put anyone to sleep — unless they’re told with humor. The kind of humor that only seems to appear when I write, not when I talk.
I’m a meticulous and precise researcher of stories, and they have to be absolutely, unmistakably different from anything that’s ever been written before.
That’s the challenge I’ve set for myself.
