Hollywood Crush › Cycler

Book fans are all too familiar with the fear that our favorite novel will be utterly destroyed when it's adapted for the screen. Can you imagine what it's like to be the author of a novel that's about to go through that process? Lauren McLaughlin was a film producer and screenwriter, working on such films as "American Psycho," before she wrote the gender-bending YA novels "Cycler" and "Recycler." But when "Cycler" was optioned for the big screen, she found herself on the other side of the process. Here, she tells the Book Report all about it.

Turning a novel into a movie is fraught with hazards. I know this intimately after adapting my own novel, "Cycler," into a screenplay. When I first set out to do this, it was like déjà vu all over again. "Cycler" began its life as a screenplay some time in the early '90s. It was a project I worked on in my off hours while I was producing and writing other people's movies. Then, one day in 2000, I decided to try my hand at writing fiction. It was only supposed to be an exercise, but it changed everything for me. Within months, I had decided to abandon my film career and pursue novel-writing full time. It was only then that I was finally able to unlock the story at the heart of "Cycler." It was, I was convinced, meant to be a novel, not a movie.

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Tags adaptation, Book Report, Books, Cycler, Lauren McLaughlin, Recycler

For some reason, we're perfectly ready to accept stories about vampires, werewolves and wizards. But whenever I've mentioned to friends the premise of Lauren McLaughlin's "Cycler" and its sequel "Recycler" — it's about a teenage girl named Jill who turns into a boy named Jack for four days every month — I've received a lot of question-mark faces. And to be fair, I thought "Cycler" would either be A) a weird, uncomfortable story, heavy on the embarrassing scenes played up for comedy (like "Tootsie" or "Just One of the Guys"), or B) a weird, uncomfortable look at gender identity and sexuality ("Crying Game" or "Boys Don't Cry"). Happily, it's neither, which is probably why it's been snatched up to be made into a movie. (McLaughlin, a veteran screenwriter, is adapting it herself, and she'll be blogging about the process right here tomorrow.)

"Cycler" is actually a warm-hearted, honest, genuinely funny story with an amazing cast of characters — all of whom you can identify with in some way, despite this very weird, uncomfortable situation they find themselves in. Jill has had this condition since she was 14, and after many fruitless consultations with baffled doctors, she and her mother decided that the only way to deal with it is to hide it from the world. So Jack spends his four days locked in the house, and Jill tells her friends and teachers that she has a weird blood disorder that requires in-patient treatment every month. She also does some amazing self-hypnosis so that not even she remembers her days as Jack — and they truly act and think like completely separate people.

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Tags Book Report, Books, Cycler, Lauren McLaughlin, Recycler