I had entered Dig Down into multiple screenplay competitions. I had placed as a finalist in the two that had ended, and had a strong sense I’d do well in the third. I was in the processing of submitting my revised draft to more competitions with the goal of getting wins.
This entering contests should’ve been second nature at this point.
Yet somehow, I always find a way.
When I was exploring options for how to enter Dig Down into the Scriptapalooza Screenplay Competition, I saw that they offered several different services, including notes and coverage. As I was interested in seeing if there was anything that could still be improved with my script, I ended up going with the general coverage they offered. This would give me a suggested logline (something I didn’t have), coverage (something I didn’t have), feedback (something I did have, but not on this draft), a scoring sheet on several categories, and an industry rating of Recommend or Pass on the script.
I had called up the competition to get clarification on the options they were providing, and the information I received was what made me select the general coverage package. Everything should have been fine.
Except after my submission, when I re-read the services provided, I didn’t see anything that said this coverage would be included in this year’s submissions for the contest. And, because the deadline was fast approaching, I had gone with this option on a Friday…the final Friday before the contest’s deadline. On Monday.
This scenario allowed me the freedom to work myself up into a panic. I was potentially getting even more feedback on my script without getting a full understanding of how it would stack up against all the other spec scripts on the market. This was only exacerbated when I tried to call Scriptapalooza again to get clarification on whether or not I had actually entered the contest. Again, this was a Friday. And even though I’m on the east coast, and they operate on the west coast…it’s a Friday.
In typical me fashion, I did the only thing that made sense. I entered the competition again, with just a regular entry, no notes provided, because all the options with notes and feedback didn’t expressly say this would be considered an entry.
This allowed me to breathe a little easier. I now knew I was entered into the contest. Now the only thing left to do was see if I could remove my multiple entries, if I had in fact entered Dig Down more than once. I emailed the competition to explain the situation to them – keep in mind this is all still on Friday – to ask for clarification, and if I had entered twice, if I could have the general entry removed.
To sum up, I had left a voicemail asking a question after already calling them up with questions yesterday, entered my script into their competition twice, and then sent an email asking if they could not only fix my error by refund me a potential duplicate entry. My goal with these contests was to get a sense of where my script stood in the marketplace, and to present myself well to professionals.
I knew I was tanking this second goal.
Thankfully on Monday, I got a reply to my email that the coverage option I had initially gone with was considered a submission to the contest, and that they would refund me the second entry. But in hindsight, I should have just gone with the coverage option. I had already placed as a finalist twice, and even though I was looking for contests to enter and win, it wouldn’t have been so bad if I had just gotten the feedback on this and not presented myself in a bad light.