Made the quarter finals of the Final Draft contest!

Today, on my way back to Boston after visiting my parents at home, I got an e-mail from the people at Final Draft. As you may remember, early this summer I set aside a few weeks early in July to edit my screenplay The Tailor of Riddling Way to submit it to a contest that Final Draft is holding with a really fabulous prize-- cash, a consultation with experts, a trailer shot for your script, and tuition to a screenwriting intensive at UCLA. My teacher Barry Brodsky said it was worth entering, so I did, figuring it would be beneficial even if it only got my to fix up my script. As I said, I got good responses to the story of it, but in screenwriting no scene should be longer than about four minutes, so my piece needed a lot of restructuring. I was fairly happy with the result, I think it ended up a lot tighter, so when the due date rolled around, I sent it off and tried too put it out of my mind.

Well, today we got our first response on it. They announced that out of almost 6,700 screenplays submitted, they narrowed them down to the top twelve percent into the quarter finals. And on that sorter but still dismayingly long list, my piece was there among them!

(You see in this screenshot off my phone the title's different. Barry said to me when I first wrote it that the original title was a bit off point, so right before I submitted it I changed it a little to try and make sure it didn't strike a reader as irrelevant. I may consider that to be the canon title from here on.)

We'll see if I manage to make it any farther. There are still so many other people to compete against that winning is pretty unlikely. But who knows, I may actually stand a decent shot at coming out the best in my genre, which you can see is Period/Historical/War, currently my favorite to write things in. I don't think there were too, too many submitted there. But I am very proud of myself to have made it into that top twelve percent. At the very least, I think it means I improved my script in the most recent edit into something respectable. :-)

Accomplishment chart, 9/13 - 9/19

For the week of 9/13 – 9/19:

Writing
- made it into the Quarter Finals of the Final Draft screenwriting contest with “The Tailor at Loring’s End” screenplay
- edited two scenes of the new musical
- 5 blog entries
- 6 daily Hipster Feminist tweets

Sewing/Costuming
- had Tom Sawyer costume fittings
- assembled Sabine Roger’s costume for Tom Sawyer
- assembled Ben Roger’s costume for Tom Sawyer
- assembled Sidney Sawyer’s costume for Tom Sawyer
- sketched a design for a high-fashion pea coat

Physical
- 1-hour circuit workout
- pulled and dug weeds for three hours
- stained a deck for two hours
- washed windows for two hours

Media
- watched season 9 of Scrubs
- watched episode 10 of Project Runway season 12

Cooking
- made chicken Marbella, baked yams, and wild rice
- made a cold seafood lunch