Check out the Stage Productions section of the website if you haven’t done so yet. I spent the last few days updating webpages and inputting production photos of Blue. Thanks to Andrew Shortt for taking these great shots.

I got another rejection letter from a screenwriting contest last week. This one was for my screenplay The School. That’s five rejections this month alone; a somewhat discouraging month for contest results, but I’ve been down this road many times before. No time for self-pity – I sent The School out to another contest within days of my latest disappointment. Readers in these contests are oftentimes overwhelmed with how many scripts they have to read and unless your script pops for them from the get-go, many, many great scripts are overlooked. The first few pages of a screenplay are the hook and you must be able to sell your script on those opening moments otherwise your script will get tossed to the side.

Speaking of scripts, I just wrapped up another one. Coffee & Cake is the Christmas play for my church. I am currently typing what I’ve scribbled on paper onto the computer. In my last blog, I spoke about how going from one script to another in the last few months has tired me out a bit. I struggled to get through this Christmas script and it felt like I was writing in a fog or dream. You know how in a dream when you are trying to run away from or run to something, but no matter how much you run, it doesn’t feel like you’re moving? That’s what I felt like when I wrote the first draft of Coffee & Cake. The writing was slow and the few pages I did get written were often scrapped or re-worked to such a point that they might as well have been scrapped altogether.

Looking down at the blank page when you first begin to write is the biggest fear…hurdle. Getting that first draft done always brings on a sense of relief and satisfaction.