Excerpt
When I arrived in Chicago, in 1998, my dream was publishing my books in order to adapt my best stories to screenplays. I started learning English from scratch, in the Temple Minora, then in ORT Technical Institute, in Oakton Community College and in Truman College. I've finished five levels of English and simultaneously I took The Screenwriters Group and Desktop Publishing and Graphic Design Course (in ORT Technical Institute). I studied in the evening and worked 60 hours a week for living.
Step by step, I've written four screenplays and sent them to a lot of competitions. I never win. The best my achievement is my screenplay "Kiss on the End of the Universe" became a quarter-finalists in the company New Century Writer Awards, 2002. After thinking why I didn't win, I sent two my screenplays to the Hollywood Institute for analysis and I've got the true about my screenplays. My main problem is poor English. In one-hundred-page screenplay must be only one (!) grammatical mistake. After that I've changed my tactic: I told myself "I have to publish my art work, then all my stories in Russian and, eventually, publish my stories in English. After that, I hope, I can polish my screenplays and send them to movie industry again.
For last four years I made thousands photographs of my paintings, put them in my computer and created the four books using QuarkXPress and Photoshop. I did all this in my spare time.
Ten years have passed and I have the first result: I created four books.