awards and honors

From its first inkling in 1984, Saardu birthed itself, morphing from a single paragraph to an award-winning screenplay in 2009. A 25-year evolution interrupted by the life of the author. They were symbiots, the idea and the writer. The bluesy rumination of her brother's mental condition, grieving the loss of her baby girl, fantasies of running away from the world, the appeal of going native, memories of being the face and voice of Raucous Rogue, all the surnames trying to attach themselves to her--the maze of it all drew her into this imaginary world. Saardu. 

Yet she still had to survive on planet Earth. She had to earn money for food and shelter and all the fun things she liked to do. Carma was as a secretary. She typed over 100 words per minute, with less than 5 errors. She had started in 1971 with a manual typewriter, and she loved the clickety-clacking of the keys and tossing the carriage back at the end of each line. She misses that. As machinery evolved, so did her skillset, and her penmanship devolved into an ugly scrawl. 

She was a single mom by age 19. Already there had been multiple traumas in her life, and they haunted and projected a disasterous future for her fatherless child. Her desperation scared men away. She wondered why her own stepfather had so easily taken on the burden of six children after her father had abandoned his wife and kids. Yet one itty bitty, sweet baby girl seemed to terrify young men in late 70s. 

In January 1979, when her daughter was 19 months, sick with pneumonia and pleurisy, homeless and sleeping on the couch of a friend whose boyfriend wanted to know how long this would go on--with a teething toddler crying--Carma opened the phone book to the yellow pages, to listings of adoption agencies. She did not call one. She might have, if it weren't night, but by morning, she called her mother. Her mother called her sister Laura and asked her to help. Laura came and got the baby and told her not to worry, just get well and get on her feet, she would take care of Chelsea as long as she needed. Easier said than done, apparently. Two months later, Laura asked if she would consider letting a couple she knew adopt her little one. Carma was working breakfast shift as a waitress (sexual harassment at her last secretarial job drove her away from that type of environment, for a while). She was staying with a different friend, she still did not have a place of her own. She had been visiting her child and the welfare and food stamps for Chelsea were going to her sister. Why couldn't she just keep taking care of her? Laura had four children of her own, including a baby and toddler. It was too much for her. Carma agreed to consider it, to meet the childless couple who were friends of her sister, and that is how it came about, the biggest mistake of her life. 

Nineteen years later, she would learn that her baby girl had suffered abuses from the age of two at the hands of this couple. Leave it there. It's a book thicker than the entire Harry Potter series. 

In 1984, she did not know that her little girl was suffering. Carma was suffering, and wrote a book for her daughter. A copy of the manuscript was mailed to the copyright office, registration number TXu000166506 dated 1984-07-16. The original manuscript was given to a friend who knew a literary manager who wanted to read it. That's the last she saw of it. Another move, another job, a new phone number--but these are not the real reasons she lost track of her only copy. That book was heavier than five hundred pages. It was a living representation of everything that had happened to her culminating in the adoption and the pain. Chronic emotional pain. Endless grief. She had to put it behind her. She didn't want that book to get published. It was easy to disappear. 

Saardu pulled her into an alternate reality where creative thought took over her brain. All that emotional energy was poured into writing The Ills of Saardu[1]. The idea sprinted toward a trilogy in 1985 with the completion of a sequel titled The Motherlands Journey, registration number TXu000216348 dated 1985-09-23. She spent a few years digging into the writer's market, queries and rejections, and in 1988, she and a new friend, Tim Flannery, dreamed of starting a publishing company. It would be called Universal Concepts. She had a logo drawn up. They looked at buildings. Then life got in the way again when her second husband nearly died of a heroin overdose. She had no idea why he was unconscious on the bathroom floor. Only later, visiting him in jail, did she learn that this person had planned a wedding with her without so much as mentioning the fact that he had an addiction. He had stolen money from her to pay for his addiction. He thought it was not "that serious" to use a little heroin to take the edge off. She had been trying to get pregnant all these months. The marriage was annulled on the basis that he had not disclosed pertinent information prior. 

[1] Note: The Ills of Saardu has been retitled and republished as The Genius of Saardu.

Skipping ahead to after her short third marriage ended, because the possibility of finding real love in this world had been marred too many times by real need, she wrote the screenplay. The life happened, this time it was happy news--she was finally pregnant! Saardu was pushed aside once more. A child was born. Twelve years later, she rewrote the screenplay. It went through numerous iterations and titles. Her 2007 version of Saardu made the Quarter-Finalists list in the PAGE International Screenwriting Contest, and listed in the Top 20% Readers Favorites of EXPO Screenwriting Contest. In 2008, Saardu reached second place as a favorite of writers and readers at Zoetrope.com. She continued to rewrite it with notes from her favorite screenwriting guru, and her 2009 iteration, titled Saardu: The Adventure Begins earned awards and honors from several sources:

• 
  Action On Film International  
• Won: Best Feature Script for Children 
• Also nominated for Best Science Fiction Feature Script
• KIDS FIRST! 
• Won: Best Script for Ages 8-12 - 3rd Place
• Fantastic Planet Screenplay Competition 
• Finalist, Best Science Fiction Script
• Yosemite Film Festival Screenplay Competition 
• Honorable Mention
• UCLA Screenwriting Letter of Recommendation from Professor Walter 
  
  
  

  

  First Trophy

  
  

  

  Carma (right), accepting award from Ranny Levy,
  President, Coalition for Quality Children's Media

  
  

  

  Carma thanks supporters at the 2009 AOF International Writers Awards Dinner, where Saardu won Best Feature Script in the Children's category

  
  

  

  Carma Gagne Chan and Richard Walter

  
  

  __________ ❤ __________

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