Last Friday I finally got a deadline. Knowing when to end something is sometimes the only way I can begin. For more than a year now, my agents, editor, mother, publicists and Facebook page have been talking about the screenplay I'm "writing" based on my collection of essays, Bitch Is the New Black. For more than a year I have not been writing. But with the yellow finish line in sight, now I can finally step off the starting line.

Here's how it actually started. In February 2009, I headed to Los Angeles to have "meetings" with people who had read some rough drafts of a few chapters of my book. By then, in addition to a proposal that included a summary of all the chapters I was planning to write, I'd really only written about astronaut Lisa Nowak, my equally crazy mother and my temporarily racist dog, Miles.

My agent sent those musings to people whose names you'd recognize in Hollywood. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks Lisa Nowak is a goddess among mere mortal women. Folks called us back. The theme of being an outsider overachiever with a penchant for rambling, rudeness and self-reflection struck a chord in La La Land. Go figure.

So I charged a Banana Republic Monogram dress, cut my hair into a bob and flew 3,000 miles to have the most important cups of coffee of my career to date. The weirdest thing about the whole situation? Exactly two years earlier, a colleague of mine at Politico told me one morning over coffee (which I'd just gotten into) that he'd dreamed I moved to Hollywood to make movies. "Typical Helena story line. Thing is, I actually think it might happen," he told me. No lie. I wanted to call Dan before I left D.C., if only to warn him about his powers. But then again, I didn't want to jinx it.