2023 Page Awards

Again the time has come when those of us who are in the same boat mindboggle over how our screenplays that have done well in other competitions failed to advance yet again. I dared to dream, as we imaginary purple koalas tend to do, that I would at least hit the Page Awards Quarter Finals again this year. I managed this feat and went on to Semi so long ago that I forget exactly what year it was.

Alas, I got nowhere this time around. That’s a yet again too. I have four completed original specs that I enjoy entering in competitions. They enjoy running the gamut of results, from oh, wow to oh, brother! It’s always beyond me how the same one can reach Finalist, Semi-Finalist, Quarter Finalist, or hit various levels levels of percentage climbed to at various times, temperatures, and perhaps phases of the moon. In a variety of competitions, sometimes with staggering numbers of fellow travelers in the valley of the shadow of death…er, disappointment.

We many, we brave, we determined dreamers. To my fellow travelers I salute you (us). Its a rough road we’ve chosen. Sometimes it’s paved with mud. Other times when there’s a bit even of advancement, it seems as if we walk streets of gold. Chins up, my fellows. We write because we have to. We enter the gates because perseverance is our battle cry.

Sorry. Goofy mood. I haven’t eaten enough (chocolate) today so my, er, unique, sense of humor gets loose. Anyway, soon there will be another year, with new deadlines and old dreams ahead.

When Only Your Neurons Do The Writing

Sometimes, no matter how much you enjoy writing, the rest of your life takes precedence. Piers got me this mug a couple of days ago, and I’ve been thinking about its message. It could mean any number of things, depending on the day you’re having. I’ve decided that for me, it means to write the story your brain’s screaming at you to tell, even during those days when you’re too busy to sit down at your keyboard and tappity tap the keys. Let your mind do its thing…plot, run dialogue, show you imagery that makes you smile…. You’re still a writer, even if your mind contains all of the process, when the need arises. Yes, sometimes you forget exactly what you want to physically write by the time you can. That’s okay. The gist is still there. Hopefully. If not your brain was still made happy by the experience. If you remember it all, all the better. When you get back to those keys, it flows like a river of words. Life sustaining word water…the stuff devoted writers crave and always manage to find a source of…even if the river is sometimes a synaptic flow looking for its waiting vessel.

2020 Big Break Screenwriting Contest Results

This year I don’t have any Little Muri Sunshine chirpy attitude to try to spread around for encouragement for myself and others. The bald fact is that neither of my drama screenplays advanced to Quarter Finalist. One of them was a Semifinalist last year. This year is difficult enough, with its never ending zombie apocalypse…er, I mean global pandemic. It does not help that they were close to two months late with results, with no indication why or information when for way too long. So, I’m being stoic and just letting it do the rolling off the proverbial duck’s back thing…after a period of grrr arrghing. I have better things to focus on this year than I have possibly ever before. I’m happily in Florida, with my new husband. There will be other opportunities ahead, most likely some unforeseen and waiting to surprise me. Will there be some kind of screenwriting success? I do not know. Of course I care. But for now, day to day, I’m focusing on staying safe and healthy and enjoying my amazing new life. Congrats to the 2020 Quarter Finalists and comiserations to those who didn’t advance. As always, believe in yourselves, hope, work on what gives you joy, and embrace love in all its forms.

2020 Nicholl Results

It’s that time of year again. Unfortunately, it’s also another year of getting nowhere, with two scripts that have hit the top 10% and 15% before. I don’t know about others this happens to. We all have different, if similar, experiences, and we all handle them in our own writery way of coping and hopefully moving forward.

As usual, when I have a bad results experience, I want to crawl into a hole in the air I breathe for a little while and whine like a dog under the porch. Who am I kidding? I don’t just want to. I do it. In my little cocoon of disappointment, I get upset, I get mad, and then I get past it and carry on. What else am I going to do? Wallowing for a little while is a really good way to cope. For me, anyway. It’s the carrying on part that’s tricky. Fortunately, I’m the flare up then die down pretty fast kind of flame. It’s keeping the pilot light of hope and faith in myself burning that’s crucial to the process.

I hit the same wall every time I acquire less than enviable competition results, though. Should I write a post about it? It’s certainly not pleasant. It’s not like I’m going to brag about something less than enviable. Or am I?

This is the conclusion I always reach. If I can put my work out there, throw my creativity into the sky like a handful of glitter, and hold fast to my dreams, then I can certainly put my less than perfect moments out into the wild as well.

Because.

Because.

Because.

There is always the chance that even a single screenwriter may come across this, feeling down and disappointed, and decide to read it. Silent comiseration and unseen camaraderie just may be the backbone of that thing we do where we fall down, wallow in glitter sprinkled mud of rejection dejection, and then get back up to tippity tap at our keyboards another day. And the day after that. And the day after that. Until we’ve key clicked our way into a lifelong habit of writing no matter what.

So, fellow nonfellows, get thee to a keyboard. Click the keys, flow the words. Make sure the creative glitter is edible, because you know it’s going to fall into your chocolate at some point. Every day is another day, and every single one has the potential to hold something marvelous, until the very last minute has clicked over into the past.

And, you know what? Right after that is another brand new day. They keep coming. And that means so can the words.

The beauty of words is that they never run out.

Happy writing to us all.

Pandemic Culture, Temporary or New Normal?

I was just sitting here, scrolling through Twitter and seeing a tweet about an upcoming pandemic movie made me start thinking too hard. Hopefully, this kind of pondering is premature, but is the time coming when we start automatically incorporating things like wearing masks and social distancing into our screenplays and novels? What about not automatically? What would it be like to have a long worked on project rejected because it doesn’t incorporate pandemic life into a contemporary setting?

I may be about to pick back up on my serial-killer- thriller-with-an-odd-bit-of-romcom-meet-cute thrown in screenplay, after taking care of my mom curtailed its progress. Though it languished for several years, it still qualifies as contemporary. So do I imagine it as taking place just before Covid-19 hit our world over its collective head? Or after, risking that it would also be thrown into a postapocalypt wasteland? Ignore the pandemic, in the screenplay’s context? Worry that if it’s mentioned at all new genres have to be added to its already odd list. Stuff like medical-thriller- science-fiction-tinged-very-nearly-reality-show-horror…. This word parade scrolls across my mind like the grand opening crawl sheet that explains Star Wars: A New Hope to awe struck movie goers.

What’s a writer to do? Screenwriter and author alike could have to face some totally unexpected creative decisions that we wouldn’t have believed possible a year ago. My instinct is to try to get my head an ostrich neck’s worth of buried in the proverbial sand. Maybe if I close my eyes and think of Kansas, I can hitch a ride on the nearest black and white tornado to a land where the biggest problem facing artists is whether to try to tone down the eye popping colors pervading Munchkinland. But, no, we’ve all already learned that wishful thinking doesn’t work. Not in normal every day life and certainly not in the midst of a global pandemic.

However. For now I’m going to work on the assumption that, like the 2018 Spanish flu pandemic, this too shall pass. Set something in our current period of fear, loss, and sorrow and write accordingly. Otherwise, create characters content to inhabit the weird, crazy, fun, beautiful, ugly, messed up mess we called normal 21st century life, before it became abnormal in the extreme.

2020 Nicholl Entries

After sitting 2018 out, from all screenwriting competitions, then being back last year to become a Big Break Semifinalist, I’ve gone for broke in this year’s Nicholl. I’ve pushed right up to the limit, with three drama entries. My life’s in a good place this year. Better than in a long time, in fact. This leads me to hope that if I get three emails with disappointing results, perhaps in a grocery store parking lot as has been known to happen in the past, those blows will be easier to withstand. I love screenwriting and entering competitions just as much as ever, but that’s now colored through through a lens that makes screenwriting and writing in general an important part of day to day existence, but an integrated part of a broader whole. It’s as if the landscape of my life has flowered into something different, with familiar landmarks joined by new ones of enticing promise. Promise, hope, anticipation of things yet undiscovered…life, screenwriting\writing…faith that the best is yet to come.

Big Break Semifinalist

Very happy to announce that my 2019 Big Break Screenwriting Contest entry has made the cut to Semifinalist! I just realized I’m smiling as I type. Screenwriting is such a cool thing to do. Being recognized for it is even cooler.

Grateful.

Big Break Quarter-Finalist

I’m very happy to announce that my drama feature entry is a 2019 Final Draft Big Break Screenwriting Contest Quarter-Finalist.

As I’ve written about in some previous posts, it’s difficult to deal with the years when nothing happens. In 2017 nothing happened, because I decided to sit out the screenwriting competitions to destress. It helped and this year I entered the Nicholl and Big Break. Not getting any positive reads in the Nicholl was disappointing and discouraging. So I seriously braced myself when the Big Break QF email came. It was such a wonderful feeling to get that reassuring, validating, thrilling moment of seeing my name and title as a Quarter-Finalist.

As the saying goes, I can dine on that for quite some time. I never stop believing in myself, but that belief gets shakey sometimes depending on how hard the winds of defeat try to blow me over. I really like this place where anything can happen and if I go right back into the doldrums that’s okay too. I’ve had the reminder that I know what I’m doing and love doing it. 

Now, I get to look forward to the upcoming Semifinals announcement. Whatever my result in that, I’m so proud to be a 2019 Big Break Quarter-Finalist.

2019 Nicholl Results

This is one of those years that make me want to just pretend I didn’t enter the Nicholl, maybe even pretend it doesn’t exist. No entry, no results, no blog post.

But, it does and I did, so here it is. 2019 is one of the rare times when neither of my two feature length screenplay entries moved the needle at all. Not a single positive read. There’s usually at least one, often more.

There. It’s out.

This blog is intended to not only cover the good things that happen to me, but also the not so good to out right bad. The good for obvious reasons. The bad so someone else dealing with something hard in their lives may stumble across it and feel a little better being reminded that we’re not in whatever it is alone. Sometimes just thinking of even one stranger sharing our pain or disappointment from afar can make enough of a difference to actually help. From Alzheimer’s caregiving, to grief, to the events that take peripheral positions to that kind of thing, we all carry burdens. Even if the “only” burden you carry today is a disappointment, a setback in your writing life, don’t ever forget that’s a legitimate thing to deal with. In some ways it’s actually a grief within itself. We put our whole selves into our scripts and stories and novels and poems. Of course the setbacks are hard to deal with.

This year I have an “advantage”. A compressed sciatic nerve is pretty much consuming my life. That kind of physical pain can outscream just about anything else. So, I was upset about my screenplays performing so poorly, especially after doing so well other years, for a few hours, then shrugged it off and carried on, as must be done when you’re addicted to screenwriting competitions.

We carry on, while running an internal question-with-no-answers session involving a loop of “why?”, “how?”, and “when will things turn back around?”. We think and hope and wonder, and keep on writing and learning and dreaming. That’s the writer’s life. Sometimes we curse it . Hopefully, briefly. The rest of the time we love it. We live it. We make happen whatever we can. If all we can make happen is our writing world, that’s enough. Where else would we want to be?

2019 Screenwriting Competitions

After sitting out last year’s screenwriting competitions, I’ve entered two this year. I have two dramas in the Nicholl and a drama in Big Break. 

It’s interesting how deciding to forego the stress that comes with waiting for, then getting the responses for a year sort of rebooted the experience for me. For whatever reason, some years I do better than others. I can’t make sense of the very real fact that the same script can do really well, even several times in a row, then suddenly tank another year. It may well get a good response the very next year. Or not. 

Eventually, the see saw burnt me out to the point that removing myself from it seemed like the best move. Takng care of my mom for so long, then finally getting us both through the end of her life introduced an element of deeper stress than I’ve ever experienced. It will be three years since her death in July. I’ve realized that recovering from all that will take me as long as it takes me. Basically, I need to rest. A lot. I have and I do and I can feel it helping. 

I can also feel that taking last year off from screenwriting competitions helped too. I feel more normal now about anticipating whatever happens, and accepting it as part of the experience that’s mostly enjoyable. So onward, hopefully upward, and always loving screenwriting.