A former stripper and phone-sex operator from Minnesota, the gregarious 29-year-old (real name: Brook Busey) has been hitting talk shows, doing magazine interviews in dive bars and making every scene that a sleeper superhit creator gets invited to.

The latter includes Steven Spielberg Land; he produced Cody's TV pilot, "The United States of Tara." And most movie awards shows, which she's expected to sweep original screenplay honors from all the way to the Oscars. (However, a misunderstanding about Writers Guild strike instructions caused her to miss accepting her first gong of the season, from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, earlier this week.)

Of course, Cody's colorful background brings the spotlight on her as much as her evident talent, if not more. She first gained attention by writing a funny blog about the sex industry. We can't print its name here, but you can find it at diablocody.blogspot.com.

"As somebody who's always written for fun, with blogging, things that I wrote on a daily basis just for my own enjoyment, I could publish myself," she recalls discovering. "It was a natural thing for somebody who's always liked to tell stories. But the DIY thing was not my choice. Believe me, I would much rather sell out and hang out with Spielberg than blog. I didn't have any political reason for blogging. It was just, like, nobody wanted to publish me."

But an L.A. reader, Mason Novick, thought someone should.

"I was blogging about stripping, which is a great way to amass a large audience very quickly," Cody deadpans, "because people are interested in that kind of thing, which we've known since the dawn of time. So people were reading the blog, and then one day I got an e-mail from this guy who said `I'm a producer/manager in Hollywood and I think you're really funny, you should try writing a movie.' I didn't recognize it as life-changingly important at all; it was just an e-mail, and it seemed kind of random and creepy, in fact."

But Novick helped Cody get her memoir, "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper," published. She then wrote "Juno" as a scriptwriting sample, in hopes of getting a chance to adapt her book for the screen.

Now, anything seems possible.

"So many thrilling things have happened to me in rapid succession that I'm not even able to process them," Cody admits. "I've been in shock for so long now that I don't even know how to register surprise anymore."