Every Day May 2013: Reaching for the stars!

Love me some Nathan Fillion

So I've decided to kick off Every Day May with a blog post about an exciting (albeit, scary) thing I did recently!  As most of you know (especially from this blog post) - I aspire to be a writer.  Over the years I've started (and occasionally completed) numerous original full-length screenplays, one novel adaptation and a couple of short film scripts.  I've written spec scripts for various television shows (including Bones, The Office, Castle, etc.) and even wrote TV Pilot for an original television show.  I've never really known what to do with something once it was completed (which in reality is only a couple of projects.)  Then I received an email about a scriptwriting contest!

The contest is being put on by Will Smith's production company (yes, THAT Will Smith) and they are looking for completely unknown television writers with original ideas.  The contest was accepting 30 min comedy and 60 min drama scripts of family friendly content.  Unfortunately, I found out about the contest FOUR days before the deadline!  Not really time to write something new, so I decided to enter the TV pilot I'd written a couple of years ago.  It's not exactly "family friendly" - but it's not bad either and upon reading the details of the contest more closely, I felt like my script could still work for what they were looking for, so I registered it with the Writer's Guild and submitted it (there's a funny story about me actually submitting it if anyone cares to hear it, let me know in the comments and I'll post it another day!)

ANYway, I'll find out by May 22nd if I'm a finalist (they'll choose up to 10 in each category) and then from there, they will choose one winner in each category.  The winner will win a sit down meeting with Overbrook Entertainment, the chance to get their script further developed, and $5,000.

This is all the exciting part, the scary part is knowing that I put my work out there, something I worked hard on and feel really good about, and there's a chance (probably a strong one) that I won't win.  That's always the risk in this situation, maybe what I think is good, nobody else will, but I'll never know if I don't try (cheesy, I know, but true!)  Anyway, I know it's a long shot... but it's a shot and it didn't hurt anything to enter and give it a try and of course I would've always wondered "what if" if I hadn't entered... so...  Hopefully by the end of the month I'll have another exciting blog entry to share with you all!!