I was sitting at the bar top of one of my local restaurants, checking my email while waiting for my food, when I saw one of the messages in my inbox was from the Page Turner Screenplay Competition. I remember straightening up in my seat and even sucking in my breath when I saw the subject line read that the scoring had changed for my entry.
Two hard weeks of revisions came down to this. I won’t say that I wasn’t a little nervous about seeing the results, though I will say I didn’t have a concern that this would have been a bad result. The nerves came from entertaining the possibility that I had won my first screenplay competition.
I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but at the same time, this competition and the feedback I got gave me the best context of where I stood. And from what I could gauge, this was a reasonable possibility.
Although there were some nerves, just like when I was deciding whether to get this level of feedback and analysis, I felt the best thing to do was believe in myself and dive headfirst into it. I opened up the email and read the result.
Dig Down placed as a finalist.
I was thrilled. Yes, it wasn’t a win, but I felt I had done everything I could to write my story the best way I could for a screenplay, and even though I didn’t win, I got the feeling I was close.
Also, with the placement as finalist, I had now shown that being placed as a finalist for Lock the Doors wasn’t a fluke, and not only had I been placed as a finalist twice, I had two different scripts that had earned a finalist placement, both of which were very different, as the stories are in two different genres.
I had gotten another taste of success, and I wanted more. And I didn’t waste too much time going out to try and get it.