Whidbey-based producer finds success in screenwriting
Published 1:30 am Friday, September 12, 2025
For a writer and producer of independent films, Whidbey Island provides the perfect backdrop to create new stories.
Whether at her outdoor desk or sitting on the wraparound porch of her South Whidbey home, Kim Hornsby is busy behind the scenes of a handful of independent movies, some still in development and others currently streaming on Amazon, Roku, TUBI and other platforms.
Released earlier this year, her movie “Braving Rapids” follows a family on a rafting trip in Colorado, where they discover a wolf cub. The youngest daughter, who is adopted, must confront her fears of abandonment while caring for the pup. Hornsby wrote the screenplay and is one of the film’s producers.
“They say don’t work with kids and dogs, but we had kids and dogs in our movie and they were easier than some of the adults,” Hornsby quipped.
Though she has been writing novels in the romance genre for years, Hornsby is relatively new to writing screenplays and working in the independent film industry.
It all started a few years ago when she met a producer who admired her book series and asked her to turn the first book into a screenplay. She quickly learned how and fell in love with it, crafting several more screenplays over the years. Compared to writing novels, the process is much quicker and offers more immediate gratification, with mostly dialogue and action lines.
Hornsby ended up pitching the screenplay for “Braving Rapids” to a filmmaker who was looking for a family movie with plans for distribution.
“To have distribution already set up before you film is like the gold nugget,” Hornsby said. “If you know where it’s going, it’s amazing, rather than making a film and then shopping it around for somebody to distribute for you all over the world.”
With the prevalence of online video conference call platforms like Zoom, people involved in making films no longer need to live in L.A. – which is good news for Hornsby, who enjoys Whidbey Island and living near her two grown children.
Though writers or producers usually aren’t required on set, she flew out to Utah in the summer of 2023 to watch filming for “Braving Rapids.” The cast featured an adorable 8-week-old Husky puppy.
Around this time, Hornsby had just moved to the Bayview area on the island after her own life-changing event – the death of her husband the previous year.
“I miss him every day, but life goes on and he would have wanted me to live my best life,” she said. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Hornsby has plans to eventually write a memoir about her life, which plays out quite cinematographically. In her earlier years, she was a scuba diving instructor by day and a singer by night in Hawaii. She opened shows for Jay Leno and Maya Angelou, among other household names.
Hornsby and her late husband worked for the same timeshare company. They met when she entered a contest that advertised a dream date with him. Though the contest turned out to be a joke, it led to three decades of love.
“He flew me to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and we really hit it off,” she recalled. “And a year to the day we got married on Maui.”
Hornsby is a USA Today bestselling author. Initially published by independent publishers, she opted not to renew with them and now self-publishes in order to retain the rights so she can continue to write screenplays from her books.
Though her 16 books contain elements of mystery, suspense and supernatural elements like ghosts, romance is the undercurrent. She even has a Christmas series based in Whistler, British Columbia, where she lived after getting married.
“My husband would say, ‘Is that me you’re writing about?’” Hornsby said with a laugh. The answer was always “no, honey.”
Romance continues to be the most popular genre of books. As a single woman, Hornsby enjoys living through the romance stories as she writes them.
“When you fall in love, that is the most cherished emotion that we’re all aiming for,” she said.
With her newfound success in screenwriting, she felt she was able to drop her dreams of becoming a well-known author.
This month, Hornsby is traveling to Greece to the set of a romantic comedy she is producing. She helped the writer with the script and finding a distributor. She also obtained her international driving permit in preparation for driving the cast and crew around.
“Right now, what’s happening in our country with such divisiveness, we need entertainment more than ever and people are really delving into comedy and romance and hopeful stories,” she said. “So the rom com is having a resurgence right now.”
Some of her favorite rom coms include classics like “When Harry Met Sally” and “You’ve Got Mail.” From the modern era, she prefers “Always Be My Maybe” and “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.”
Her screenplay about a country music star trapped in a small town during a snowstorm that was adapted from her book “Christmas in Crystal Creek” is currently in development. But she has high hopes of a multi-million dollar budget for an adaptation of her “Dream Jumper” series, which was set to be filmed on a tropical island off Madagascar. Unfortunately, financing and the project’s producer fell through when they withdrew from all American projects because of the new presidential administration’s foreign taxes on investment.
“Now I produce other people’s movies but also have my own projects that I’m hoping to see on the screen at the Clyde,” she said.
And someday, the Village by the Sea may have its big moment in the spotlight. Her dream is to get a rom com filmed in Langley, and she even has her eye on a place that was featured on the Whidbey Island Garden Tour as a possible filming location.
“Love makes the world go round,” she said. “There is nothing stronger, no stronger emotion than love.”
Her books can be found at Moonraker Books in downtown Langley and available online at Amazon.com. They will also be available at Mutiny Bay Antiques in Freeland starting in October.
To learn more about Hornsby’s work, visit kimhornsby.info.
