LA diary: Hollywood's still for the taking

Big ambitions ... Lisa Marks in Hollywood

When I first moved to LA, Mark Tungate, a writer friend of mine who relocated from London to Paris eight years ago, had these words of advice, "Make the most of your first year in California. You'll soak up all the wonderful details of living in a new city, and everything around you will be exciting and new. It's a great time to write a book." (He did exactly that himself and is now a very successful author).

I revelled in those first few months of relative freedom in the sunshine and because I had given myself a break from work, all I did was work on my own creative projects.

I didn't write a book but I did complete a first draft of a feature film and got two short films made, both of which I directed, so that ticked a few exciting boxes.

Those heavenly months made me realise that if all I had to do was get up in the morning and write my own stuff with a head free from any other worry, I'd probably have a good chance of making it my living. My output in the early days was phenomenal and more importantly, relatively successful.

However, life - and paying the bills - got in the way and unlike those people who can get up at 4am and write for three hours before work, I find that very hard to do. Especially as my day job is writing. I've still yet to find a way to marry work and the reality of getting a script written - and having a life at the end of it all. What happened is that I stopped working on my projects and the dream got lost.

So this week I realised, and I hate to paraphrase John Major, that I needed to get back to basics.

It's easy when you've been living somewhere new for 18 months to become closed to everything that is around you. Everyday life becomes ordinary and the details blur. I don't have to consult a map every time I leave the house. I have a dentist, a doctor and social security number. I have boring old direct debits and a subscription to Netflix, a membership with AAA and I know where to get most everything including the best Indian food, Heinz salad cream and the oil needed to stop my bike chain from rusting. I'm at the point when everything is easy because I know it. I'm walking around in a comfortable little bubble.

So this week I made a point of soaking up everything around me. I noticed that fact that the LA Times food section spent an entire page reviewing fried chicken (ok, it was from Koreatown but fried chicken?), that the Mexican families on the beach always seem to be smiling, that I'm still the only person at the crossing who will walk across the road even if the little red hand is flashing (what's the point of waiting if nothing is coming?), that the waiting service here is generally excellent except when you go out in West Hollywood at night and then it becomes a battle to find a waitress who gives a damn.

I also made the decision to go back to Writer's Boot Camp. It was on the back of my course there that I won the Duke City Shootout, so something clearly worked for me. As part of my prize, I won another course and so I'm going back in August to write another feature script. It's part-time so I should be able to fit it around the day job.

Just making that decision made me feel better. I've had a killer idea for a film, I've started to write my character biogs and feel that after several months in a writing wilderness, I'm finally back on track. Writing film scripts is why I came to Los Angeles. And who knows, one day it just might become a book.