After blitzing out attendance to two film festivals for two straight weekends, I was free to focus on other aspects of my writing. While it was nice not having to plan out a whole excursion to watch movies because I couldn’t pursue my main goal of networking, this also wasn’t the time to take my foot off the gas pedal. I knew I needed to keep making choices that would help me advance my writing career.
The only avenue of this kind of advancement was actions that would get me representation, and due to the writer’s strike, I couldn’t actually pursue this. The harsh reality of the situation stung a little. My script for Dig Down had placed as a finalist in two separate screenwriting contests, and were still in consideration for a handful of others I had entered that I was still waiting on the results for. I had never been in this advantageous of a position before, and because of current events that were out of my control, I couldn’t move forward while my motivation was at its max and the iron was hot.
I didn’t allow myself to get deterred during this holding period. I still attended some screenwriting webinars, because there was nothing barring writers from doing so. They gave similar advice, which was to continue working on screenplays, even though no deals could be struck, because once this strike eventually ended, producers were going to be in need of quality scripts to replenish the stockpile they had started to burn through leading into the strike.
This simple advice was fantastic, and I realized quickly that it could help me set a course to navigate this advantage I’d gotten for myself by entering and placing well in several contests. There were two tasks that came to mind, and both had potential to really help me market myself once I was able to once again seek representation.
I’ll get into what I ended up doing, next time.