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These were new highs in my writing career.

In the span of a week, I had placed as a finalist in not one, but TWO screenplay competitions. While I believed in my writing, my initial goal upon entering was just to get feedback as this was a medium I wasn’t two familiar with.

Not only that, but these were also the only two contests I had gotten results back on. And one of them had had me convinced I wouldn’t place so well.

There was still one more contest, Finish Line Script Competition, that I was waiting on the results for, which wouldn’t occur until much later. They, like the Page Turner Screenplay Contest, allowed me to re-submit my script after I made revisions based on their notes. I had taken their feedback into consideration when I was making my edits based on the script consultation with Page Turner, so I felt the changes I had made would be suitable for re-submission for both contests.

After going through the screenplay one last time before submitting it to Finish Line (after finding the odd italics glitch, I wasn’t leaving anything to chance anymore) I started looking into more contests to enter. Placing as a finalist was great, but wins look better on a resume.

I started looking at upcoming contests with final deadlines fast approaching that would post results shortly thereafter. One in particular caught my attention, one that I had actually entered fifteen years prior. When I saw the name again, I knew I had to enter the Scriptapalooza Screenplay Competition.

Riding high from placing as a Finalist in the Page Turner Screenplay Competition, I didn’t want the ride to end. I was wasting no time looking for more contests to enter. I saw that the Scriptapalooza competition had a deadline coming up, and that it too was offering analysis and coverage on submissions as one of its submission options, my head was in full analysis mode of how I was planning on entering.

So when I found an email waiting for me announcing a scoring change for both Dig Down and Lock the Doors, I was caught off guard, because I had already moved on to the next wave of submissions. I was taken even more aback when I saw the result.

I PLACED AS A FINALIST AGAIN!!!

As a reminder, this was the contest that I had disagreed with some of the assumptions they had made when they provided feedback. I had one aspect in particular had been taken so far out of context, and with the Page Turner deadline looming, had decided to abandon revisions and resubmission because I felt it was better to focus on a contest that I saw more eye to eye with. I had just expected to get the standard “we’re sorry, we had so many great entries, its hard to choose, but we didn’t pick yours” types of rejection letters.

When I saw I placed as a finalist, it did help reshape my perspective on the notes. When I read it, I believed they just assumed the worst in me (not as a writer, as a human), so the placement made me rethink that their note was more out of concern about how the diction – this was from a character who just had their jaw broken – might come across to others, and not necessarily what they believed.

What’s more, Lock the Doors placed with an honorable mention, which I felt was fair because this wasn’t a horror specific contest, and I wouldn’t expect the genre to score well in it. The fact that it did gave me a sense of validation. It no longer felt like a fluke that Lock the Doors placed as a finalist in the first contest I entered it into.

Also, with Dig Down, I was now two for two in placing as a finalist in the two contests that had concluded, with one more still to go. And in the case of the Santa Barbara contest, I felt a sense of redemption in the choices I made in telling the story.

I couldn’t wait to enter another contest.

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.

After an intense two weeks of revisions on my script of Dig Down, I definitely found myself enjoying the downtime afforded to me now that I wasn’t staring down the barrel of a deadline. My phone consultation to review the screenplay had been on March 10th, and because I couldn’t submit it before midnight because of the obstacles I described in the previous blog post, I submitted my final entry in the wee hours of the 25th, the day before the final entries were due.

I enjoyed the ability to relax after pushing myself to that level of rewrites, and I had a strong sense of satisfaction. I felt I had left everything out there when making the edits. There would be no second guessing of ‘Should I have also made those revisions’ or ‘I wish I had taken the time to do…’.

Don’t get me wrong, as a writer you’ll always debate decisions you make and weigh them against the creative choices you didn’t take. But when I’m speaking to is a belief that I had addressed every area that could be improved that was covered on the call, and what I had spotted while reading and re-reading my script through the editing process. While I don’t think I or anyone ever makes all the right choices, I can at least say confidently that I worked to improve them as best I could.

What a difference the rest of this weekend was compared to the previous. There wasn’t any resemblance to the twelve hour days of writing with the constant interruptions of going down to the basement to empty out the ever filling bucket of water. The only exertion I faced was Sunday morning when I got back on the indoor track to run, the first time all week that my writing schedule had permitted it. That’s honestly all I remember from that weekend.

All I had to do now was sit back and wait for the notification of the results. And that wouldn’t be long.

The deadline for the contest was Sunday night. I would get the results Tuesday.

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.

After two straight days of working nearly twelve hours on my script of Dig Down, while simultaneously working to keep water from accumulating in my basement, I felt oddly refreshed going into the second – and final – full week I had left to make revisions and re-submit my screenplay. I’d definitely had less grueling weekends that left my exhausted when facing a new week, and yet, even after such a focused and disciplined two days, I felt eager for the week ahead.

I think this could be attributed to a couple things. The first was that I was doing what I loved, working on one of my stories, and with a clear direction of how to make it better and bring out the best of it. The second was that I had made a lot of progress over the weekend and felt like I had the finish line in sight.

My second set of weekdays working on the script was very similar to the first, only this time, instead of chiseling away on minor improvements, I could see the edits starting to take a real shape on the screenplay as a whole. And that just fed my motivation more. With each passing day, I came home from work with the intention of just fine tuning a couple of small things in the script, much like I had done the week before. Only this time, I could see that each change I made brought me one step closer to my goal, a goal that was becoming clearer to see.

And that just drove me to work on Dig Down a little bit longer.

Much like the weekend, social plans were forgone to work on the screenplay. This even included meeting up with my writing group for the sole purpose of dedicating an hour to writing – the time to get there and back, and the half hour to an hour we would talk afterwards would just cut into the time I could spend actually working on the screenplay. I even skipped my usual runs on Tuesday and Thursday, originally just sacrificing the first because I felt I would be done by the second. (I was close in my estimation).

As the week wore on, I think I was even starting to regret that work was getting in the way. But by Thursday night, when I once again worked until I looked up at a clock and realized how late it had gotten, I knew it was a moot point.

Dig Down had incorporated the feedback I’d gotten from the three contests I had entered. For me, all that was left was to give it one final readthrough.