Good Eye, Natalie Green: a prologue and a story
Sorry in advance and in hindsight to Liam Aiken, as always
Doing something a little differently this week. Instead of recommending existing romance novels, after a trip to my hometown where I first became a writer I wanted to share what I’ve personally been working on, as well as a little story about where the first spark of inspiration came from. I hope you’ll forgive me this bit of indulgence, and if not, well, it’s my newsletter so I guess we’ll all just have to live with it.
At age 11, I was deep in the terrifying pits of puberty and having weekly identity crises. I loved playing basketball, harassing my pets, reading, and writing frankly disturbingly and/or violent short stories to the delight and horror of my teachers. I was too tomboyish for the girls, too much a girl for the boys, fitting in a little bit everywhere and a lot nowhere. The cocktail of undiagnosed depression and anxiety and diagnosed (if lacking the vocabulary to describe) patriarchal oppression and compulsory heterosexuality was potent.
Then I went to a female classmate’s birthday party at my hometown mall (horrifying) because I knew at the end we were seeing A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), adapted from one of my favorite book series at the time. That’s where I saw him for the first time. The singular source of my obsession for pretty much the next decade, the reason I learned Photoshop (a skill which I have since used in every single professional opportunity I’ve ever had), the face of the imaginary friend that helped me cope with being bullied…
Liam Aiken. Actor, musician (sorry again for sending those weird inflammatory messages to your high school band’s MySpace page), runner up to the role of Harry Potter.
This story isn’t about Liam, a person I have never and will never meet despite the truly unhinged number of images of us together as a result of my early Photoshop experiments. This story is about how I’ve always, in a detached intellectual way of course, found my own obsession with this actor narratively intriguing. Bullied tomboy parasocially fixates on a famous actor and he essentially becomes her imaginary friend/boyfriend as a way to escape her life… what would happen if they ever met, but because it’s objectively weird the way she’s fixated on him for so long she has to hide her long-time fangirling? What if he hated being famous for some reason, so he has a lot of baggage about fangirls? And what if they fell in love for real, but the fake teen love she harbored for so long was revealed at exactly the wrong time?
This narrative intrigue was put on the backburner for nearly 15 years. In that time, I went to therapy (cue sigh of relief to everyone around me), I met a boy in real life and married the hell outta him, and became a screenwriter and indie filmmaker. Then at the beginning of 2022 I began a new hyperfixation completely out of the blue, reading 366 romance novels that year and writing 3 of my own.
The first piece of prose I tried my hand at after more than a decade writing scripts is called Good Eye, Natalie Green which follows the titular Natalie Green, a broke barista by day, aspiring cinematographer by night, with a long-time celebrity crush on actor Rowen Kelly. When the real life superstar walks into her cafe fresh out of rehab and in need of a crew for his new film, she knows nothing will ever be the same. Not to mention this is her last shot at her dream career before she runs out of money.
Rowen’s baggage with fame and self image make him automatically suspicious of fans, so Natalie decides early to keep her long-time crush to herself, focusing on the last dregs of her professional future until it’s clear that the chemistry between them is no fantasy. This book is about idealization (of celebrities, in relationships, of gender roles, of yourself) and the destructive (yet deceptively subtle) power of the patriarchy.
I’m actively querying agents with this novel right now. I’ve got 16 official rejections and even more unofficial ones (from not hearing back) but I remain committed to telling this story for sad little 13 year old me and energized 31 year old me. Do you know a literary agent who might want to take a look? Let me know!
In the meantime, please enjoy this deleted prologue which pretty closely mirrors how I first saw Liam Aiken for the first time, as a treat.
Deleted Prologue from: Good Eye, Natalie Green (an unpublished contemporary romance by Bri Castellini, please introduce me to your agent thanks in advance 😘)
Natalie
January 15, 2006. Mesa Mall. Crossriver, CO.
My resolve was breaking.
Fidgeting on a hard wooden bench clearly not designed for long-term comfort across the corridor from Claire’s, I glowered at the explosion of pink and purple and silver sparkles that were visible even from my position fifty yards away. I had assumed the combination of “smallest store in the mall” plus “dwindling birthday shopping funds” meant a ten minute pit stop, back when I’d dramatically insisted I’d wait for the rest of the group outside the store. Fifteen, if the newly 12-year-old Ava Oshiro decided to get her ears pierced with her last crisp $20 bill and some pocketed coins.
Thirty minutes later, I was swinging my legs at a speed I was frustrated to discover wasn’t granting me flight. I had no intention of joining the other girls, as my tomboy cred was already shaken from the earlier excursion through Bath and Body Works, but neither did I want to stay out here by myself.
Ugh. Who goes shopping for their birthday party? Wasn’t the point of a birthday to have someone else shop for you?
Not to most girls my age, apparently. Ava’s mom had picked us all up from our respective homes around the Grand Valley, a town at the base of the Rockies, and unceremoniously dumped us out at the entrance to Mesa Mall. I wasn’t even certain she’d fully stopped the minivan before we tumbled free, slammed the door, and she peeled away to get another tacky gel manicure.
I checked my Star Wars: The Phantom Menace watch again (my only purchase the entire “party,” from the CD store where they’d browsed Britney Spears albums they already owned. It was shaped like Anakin Skywalker’s head in his pilot helmet) and groaned loudly, causing a passing group of elderly power walkers to whip their heads in unison at me as they passed. 38 minutes. 38 minutes of Claire’s browsing wasn’t just unbelievable, it seemed actively antagonistic.
Glaring at the gaggle of three other girls through the frosted class, I fidgeted with the baseball hat I’d crammed this morning over my mass of curly brown hair. A few locks had escaped on the left and I shoved them back inside, the hat struggling to contain it all. My mom wouldn’t let me cut it any shorter until I agreed to go to this birthday party, and it was almost worth the now three and a half hours of utter torture. Almost.
At this point, I’d rather let my hair go full Rapunzel than spend another second on this bench with these girls who seemed on a mission to track down girlier and girlier items towards me to watch my face reach dangerous levels of red.
“Nat! Nat!”
Finally. I looked up, greeted by my trio of… friends? Not exactly the right word, but sometimes Ava (the birthday girl, bubbly and friendly and new to school), Lana (classmate since pre-school, earnestly religious), and Rhiannon (the first girl in our school to wear makeup) let me eat lunch at their cafeteria table instead of booting me coldly or spending the hour passive aggressively bullying me. Which at this rate was as close to friendship as I could claim, hence my mother’s insistence that I attend this awful feminine farce of a birthday party.
“Look!” Ava swayed her hips and arms, showing off a baffling amount of sparkly costume jewelry and red and purple hair extensions cutting against the usual black hole of her dark straight hair.
“Cool. I like the colors, they go good together.” I wasn’t sure what else they needed, so rarely was I asked for an opinion on anything by my peers, but that apparently sufficed.
“C’mon, we’re going to be late for the movie!” Lana tugged the other two towards the theater at the end of the mall and I trudged along behind. At last, I’d reached the point of the party I actually looked forward to.
Regrettable Incidents of an Extremely Normal Childhood was an adaptation of one of my favorite book series, where two orphans were kicked from weirder to weirder places in a steampunk-y fantasy world, trying to survive and stick together long enough for them to age out of the foster care system. A bit dark for eleven year olds, and I was frankly impressed Lana’s parents let her read it, but it was an international best seller and unsurprisingly less than two years after the first book was published, someone had adapted it into a major motion picture. It had been in development for a while, as the casting agents insisted on finding relatively unknown actors for the two lead roles, but at long last, I was going to get to see my favorite characters alive on screen.
We waved at Ava’s newly manicured mom, who handed out our tickets without even glancing at her daughter’s new colorful hair.
“Are you not coming too?” Ava asked, looking at her mom’s now empty hands.
“I’m gonna go get a coffee. You girls have fun!” Mrs. Oshiro barely looked up from her bedazzled fuchsia fingers as she headed out. Lana and Rhiannon were already inside, counting their remaining cash to see if they could get popcorn, and as much as I tried to remain impassive, also desperately craving a snack, it was impossible to not notice Ava’s face fall.
“It’s probably better that she doesn’t watch with us.” I blurted before I could stop myself. Ava stared at me, lower lip trembling. If I was out of my depth before, Ava bursting into tears at her own birthday party would completely submerge me, so I hurried to continue. “Last parent’s night you guys were sitting next to me and my parents, and your mom had just gotten a manicure, and she was tapping on the desk the entire time. I bet she’d be bored and tapping the whole time, and I really really want to see this movie and it sucks that she doesn’t want to spend your party with you but it would probably also suck if she distracted us so I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sorry but also I’m not.
“My dad wouldn’t go with me into the doctor’s office last week,” I continued, not able to stop myself from talking and encouraged by her continued lack of tears, “because it was a girl doctor for girl checkup things. It sucked, because I was kind of scared because I’d never met this doctor before, but then she talked to me for like fifty minutes about my ‘changing body’ so I think actually it was probably good that he didn’t come in, because it would have been super weird.”
The beat of silence that followed my rant seemed to stretch as long as the last five minutes of pre-algebra class with Mr. Bronson.
“You’re so weird, Natalie Green.”
Ouch. This is why I didn’t hang out with other girls. I started to head into the theater before she could tell me I was no longer invited when she grabbed my arm.
“That’s a good thing. I’m weird, too.”
I glanced up and down at her, an explosion of femininity, and then at myself, with my convertible cargo pants and faded basketball t-shirt. If we were both weird, we were on opposite sides of the spectrum.
“Do you want to sit together at the movie?”
“Why?”
She rolled her eyes, linking our arms together and marching me forward. “Because we’re friends.”
By the time we were all seated in the middle of the tiny theater, me next to Ava who insisted on sharing her extra large buttered popcorn with chili flakes with me, I was thoroughly rattled at the whiplash of the day but not about to look a movie snack horse in the mouth.
And that’s when I saw him. I vaguely remembered the casting announcements on my favorite pop culture blog, Reel Good Movies, but hadn’t recognized any of the names and frankly couldn’t have cared less. They were adapting Regrettable Incidents, the cast seemed age appropriate (16 for the sister character, 14 for the brother, both actors with extremely Irish-sounding names), and that was as far as I cared to investigate. But as the first scene played out, ripped directly from the pages of the book, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
Looking mournful but resolute, surrounded by a charred graveyard and stormy skies, was Angus Hamish, my literary crush of the past few years who paled in comparison even in my imagination to the boy bringing him to life on screen. In the books, Angus was the practical, steadying force to his sister’s impulsive bravery, and I adored how his own bravery wasn’t considered lesser. He may be slower to act, but he never hesitated to jump into the fray to defend those he loved, in spite of every instinct screaming to stay still. He never belittled his sister’s antics, or wrote her off as a foolish girl, and stood shoulder to shoulder with her as they leveraged their cleverness to survive a series of regrettable incidents beginning when they were violently separated from their family by a powerful supernatural cult.
It was as if Angus’ dark cerulean eyes (we’d recently been given color wheels in art class) bored into my very center when the camera moved for a close up, his windswept dark hair not daring to interrupt the stare.
“Emily, we have to go,” he was saying to his on-screen sister. “Before they come back. There’s nothing to salvage here anymore. Everything has changed.”
Rocked to my 11-year-old core, I couldn’t agree more.
