Mary Casanova is a well-known author of many American Girl books and more. In fact, she has 40 books published and more on the way.

But she’s taking on a new challenge: adapting her work to the screen.

“Stories set in the 1920s on Rainy Lake, ‘Frozen,’ ‘Ice Out,’ and ‘Waterfall,’ just lended themselves to a bigger – I thought a movie at first and realized no, that’s not big enough. I think we need a television series,” Casanova said. “So think ‘Downton Abbey’ meets ‘Boardwalk Empire.’”

Her home is International Falls, but she was in Duluth this past weekend for the North Star Story Summit, which was good timing. She just recently found out that the screenplay for her pilot episode won a Script Award. When she first got the email, she thought she must be one of many.

“Probably I’m like one of 400 winners, right? It can’t be anything serious,” she said. “And I looked further, and it was like, oh, there’s eight categories. And I won, my pilot for ‘Rainy Lake’ won the Best Television Series script.’ It’s an international competition, so I’m feeling just a little elevated right now.”

Her advice for aspiring writers is to be open to feedback.

“Even this pilot that I have now, I had sent it in for early comments. It came back with some pretty scathing comments, to be quite honest. I was like, well, maybe I should just quit this,” Casanova said. “But then I have this choice. Try it and see what I can do and jump off a cliff again.”

People can track her work at marycasanova.com.