Michael Mares “Would we be better off buying a Lottery Ticket?” 

Saturday, November 10th , 2012; 10 am—noon

Norman Public Library, Room A-B

The chances of having a spec screenplay become a finished movie are near zero. Why do people write screenplays?

Michael A. Mares, PhD, is director of the Sam Noble Museum and professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma. He has a rodent, a bat, and a parasite named after him. He is a world authority on the natural history of desert rodents and desert rodent evolution, and is responsible for the discovery of many species new to science. And he is a screenwriter too. 

 In April 2011, Mares won the Beverly Hills Film Festival Golden Palm Award for Best Screenplay for his screenplay, God’s Architect, selected from 802 feature-length scripts. In May 2011, his script, Open Borders, won first place at the Los Angeles Movie Awards competition. Both screenplays have won additional awards in competitions and God’s Architect is currently under option in Hollywood.

Under Mares’ leadership, and after raising more than $45 million dollars, the Sam Noble Museum was built and opened in 2000.

—Andy Horton, VP-Program

Novelists Linda Basinger and Sherry Bynum will share their impressions of the Killer Nashville Conference they attended in August. We put off their report last month, but cannot wait any longer. These two suspense/thriller writers learned about deadly ways and means to bump off a character or two, make the reader wait for it . . .wait for it . . . wait for it—and practically die of the building suspense. 

They said this conference was even better than last year’s, which they talked about for weeks. You’ll want to hear why.  

—Kathleen Park, President