Two full weeks after the phone consultation for my script of Dig Down, I was ready to finally submit my revised draft…almost.
As most writers will tell you, even when they believe they’re done, they’ll probably want to give their work one last look over. And this was certainly no exception. I’d gotten the most in-depth analysis to date on any of my stories, and if nothing else, the last week in particular demonstrated just how serious I was taking it.
I was pleased with how far I’d come taking in the feedback and critiques and applying them to improve my screenplay. I’d been very driven in the past when it came to my writing, achieving goals and deadlines I’d set for myself. But that was just it, they were targets I’d set. If I missed it, all that I really lost was a bit of my pride.
This was an actual competition, with a hard deadline. If I continued to make minimal progress, like I’d done that first week, and either re-submitted subpar work, or didn’t re-submit, I could actually lose out on where I ranked in the contest.
One last read through seemed more than warranted.
I had only expected it to take me two hours. Each page of a screenplay roughly equates to one minute of screentime, and I was just shy of 120 pages. I figured this would account for encountering those pesky spelling and grammar errors that have managed to survive endless rounds of edits and skims.
But, as was the case with the week before, we’d gotten precipitation, which was now finding its way into my basement. It wasn’t as severe as the previous weekend, but I still found my readthrough of Dig Down interrupted at least every twenty minutes as I trekked down to the basement to empty out the bucket that had been collecting water before it could overflow.
And…there were those pesky typos. More than I would’ve liked.
All told, it ended up taking me over three hours to go through the script one last time. Despite the errors I found, I was satisfied with where the screenplay was at.
All that was left was to attach a pdf of the latest version…and then work out the formatting kinks in that. Some of the words were in different languages, either Spanish or Italian, and they were now either expanding across an entire line on the page, or had a hideous gap separating itself from the word before it.
None of this was what I needed, let alone expected. This had all been smooth in the version I had saved to pdf prior to these last edits.
Thankfully, it only took me…a half hour to resolve these new problems.
And when I did, and found the right email chain I wanted to attach the screenplay too, and after TRIPLE checking that I had attached the right version, at the crack of dawn, I submitted my screenplay.
All that was left was to wait.